Scott Benner 1/11/22 Scott Benner 1/11/22

#610 Fort Brag on Chad

Tara is the mother of a child with type 1 diabetes and the wife of Chad from episode 409.

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DISCLAIMER: This text is the output of AI based transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors and should not be treated as an authoritative record. Nothing that you read here constitutes advice medical or otherwise. Always consult with a healthcare professional before making changes to a healthcare plan.

Scott Benner 0:00
Hello friends, and welcome to episode 610. Love the Juicebox Podcast a

little over a year ago, the gentleman came on the show to talk about his child's diagnosis. That man had a wife. That person is terror, and she's here today to expand on their story. So if you want to hear the beginning part you have to go to Episode 409 For Mathias. But if you're all caught up, settle in and get started, because this is Tara, and she's the mother of a child with type one diabetes. While you're listening, please remember that nothing you hear on the Juicebox Podcast should be considered advice, medical or otherwise, always consult a physician before making any changes to your health care plan, or becoming bold with insulin. If you'd like to support the podcast and support people living with type one diabetes, all you have to do is be a US citizen who is either the parent of a child with type one or type one themselves. Go to T one D exchange.org. Forward slash choose box fill out a quick survey that can be done from your phone while you're on the sofa. I mean, on the can even I mean like while you're on the toilet, T one D exchange.org forward slash juicebox you'll be supporting people with type one diabetes and the Juicebox Podcast when you complete that survey

this show is sponsored today by the glucagon that my daughter carries G voc hypo penne Find out more at G Vogue glucagon.com forward slash Juicebox Podcast is also sponsored by touched by type one. Now you can find out more about touch by type one on their website touched by type one.org or on their Facebook and Instagram pages. Touch by type one has a mission to elevate awareness of type one diabetes to raise funds to find a cure and to inspire others to thrive.

Tara Caudill 2:05
My name is Tara Caudill. I'm the wife of Chad coddle who did episode 409 and the mother of Matthias coddle is our type one diabetic four year old.

Scott Benner 2:14
And 409 was called for Mathias is that right? That is right. I see. I thought that that or somebody said, I don't know exactly how it happened anymore. I do remember the conversation being great. And then saying one day I would like to talk to your wife and I guess this is you and here you are. Here I am. Yeah. Is it? Is it was it? What's my question? How was it listening to your husband talk about the diabetes without you having input into what was being said.

Tara Caudill 2:48
It was exciting. Because I was I was very proud of him. Not like a like pat him on the back. Oh, good boy kind of way. But uh, I was happy that he was able to voice his side of it, especially because he took he took the full brunt of it. I was gone when all of it went down. So it was nice that he was able to share his story, especially being you know, him being a dad, you know, and he's, he's the best dad that I could ever asked to be the mother of my kids, especially when you know, crap hit the fan.

Scott Benner 3:20
He's the best that I could ever asked to be the mother of my kids. That makes sense. Did you mean to say that, or did it just come out? Naturally?

Tara Caudill 3:28
It kind of just came out that way. Yeah. But you know what I meant?

Scott Benner 3:31
No, I actually I think you meant that. And I sometimes I think my wife used to speak to me speak about me like that, too. So well. I mean, he's a good mom. Like, all right. Okay. So, so this is coming back to me a little bit. You were people are like, couldn't you have just figured out what but you know, I don't know what I'm talking about before we start recording. So you were in the military, right? Yes. And your son was diagnosed, there was some like, there was some drop, give me give me your side of the diagnosis.

Tara Caudill 4:04
Sure. So I was actually getting ready to graduate basic training. This would have been in February of 2019. And I wasn't, I wasn't supposed to be able to call home this night. But it ended up being Valentine's Day night, we were able to call home. And the drill sergeants were like, you're only supposed to ask like these three questions. We were only supposed to ask like, are you coming? Do you know how to get there? Do you know what time to be there? And then we were basically supposed to hang up. But of course, we always tried to squeeze in conversation into a 62nd phone call. And so when I called Chad Valentine's Day, nice. I was like, Hey, baby, you don't have Valentine's Day. I get the call, like surprised. And he goes, Yeah, yeah. How much time do you have? And I said why not long. I just have to ask these three questions. And he goes, Yeah, okay, I got that. How much time do you have? And I was like, What's going on? You're scaring me. And he said, he's gonna be okay. But we're in the ER right now in the bias was just diagnosed type one diabetic. Wow. And it was so out of left field, I just remember my jaw, like hit the floor. I was what? I cannot have heard you correctly. Did you? Did you really just say that? And he said, Yeah, I'm in the ER with him right now. He's like, your grandma is coming up from Florida. And your mom and dad are already on the road. They're coming down from Kentucky, we were living in Georgia at the time. And we're, we're going to be fine. He's, we're going to be here for a few days. And he said, as long as everything goes, well here, we should still be at your family day in your graduation. And it was in like, less than a week. I think he had like, three or four days before they had to hit the road to make a trip to Fort Jackson, to get there for my family day. But uh, I learned on family day that he he wasn't going to tell me at first. And to give context to that, because it was so close to my graduation, he the only way he was going to be able to contact me was through Red Cross message. And he was terrified that if he sent a Red Cross message, and that I received it, that they would pull me out of training. And that was just going to delay my graduation, which you know, overall, I would have, I would have been away from home longer. And so I I did tell him after the fact I was like, I completely understand that. You know, I understand why you went about it the way you did if it had been like, right after I had left for basic and was gone for, you know, the three months or what have you. And then he didn't tell me that whole time. Yeah, words definitely would have would have been spoken.

Scott Benner 7:01
But he was making a decision because it would have kept you there longer in this moment. That's interesting. Hey, I want to digress for half a second for people who say they miss hearing Basal snore on the podcast. I think we just heard terrorists dog drink about a gallon of water during the story. She told him I right about that time. Yeah, it might have been. No, don't be sorry. That's why you don't hear Basal snoring anymore, because I moved away from where the dogs are I but I still get notes like I miss Basal snoring. I'm like, I don't miss editing out all the noise. So sorry, but But um, okay, so this is kind of fascinating, in that I don't have any military knowledge. So you're in basic training, it sounds like for three months, there's a graduation date, you have very little contact with the outside world or your family. And so your husband has to make the decision. Like if I tell her that this is happening, like there's no special circumstances where he just calls a number and says, Hey, you guys got my wife over there in basic training. And my kid has type one diabetes now like, there's no it doesn't turn into a more human interaction. It stays very military and by the rules no matter what's going on. And then if you need to have that conversation, then you have to break away from what you're doing, which elongates your time there. I understand that right?

Tara Caudill 8:21
Yeah, pretty much. I had a friend whose grandfather died when we were in basic together. And the only way she found out was through Red Cross message.

Scott Benner 8:32
And then, and that's just like a note, like, it's, it makes it feel like a telegram when you say it like that, but it just, it just comes written to you or somebody. How does that work? If that

Tara Caudill 8:42
happens, um, so yeah, they they contact through Red Cross message. I've never actually had to do it before. But um, there was a drill sergeant who pulled who pulled her aside, and I went with her as her battle buddy, because you can't be alone during basic training. So I went with her as her battle buddy to go talk with the drill sergeant. And I kind of stepped back because I realized what was happening and they handed her a sheet of paper. And, you know, they said, you know, we're sorry for your loss. You know, if you if you want to try and call home, they afforded her that opportunity, and she was able to call home.

Scott Benner 9:15
Wow. Okay, so the, the time that your husband imagines works out and they're able to come to your graduation, yes, thank God. So you see your son with type one diabetes for the first time at that moment. I'm wondering what that was like, because it's got to be an emotional day. Aside from that.

Tara Caudill 9:37
I don't think I don't think at first it really hit me. I could tell that he didn't feel very well. He wasn't his he was coming back to life, essentially. But uh, he was just eating nonstop. So whenever we went to go get something to eat for that family day. He was just constantly, you know, scuffing stuff down and Now, you know, he was Matthias was trying to eat or getting ready to eat. And it was long before we found like Juicebox Podcast or anything like that. So my husband's you know, pulling out the syringes taken out the the meter, you know, to prick his finger and everything like that. And my mom is type one diabetic. She's been type one since she was for around four or five. So it was something that I was used to seeing. But now it's my own kid. Was the complete in that it was completely different at that point. Yeah, I just, I kind of just had to sit there and be like, What? What is happening? Do

Scott Benner 10:39
you? Did you know how? I mean? I know you've had seen it with your mom the whole time. But did you honestly know anything about it?

Tara Caudill 10:48
I knew enough to help her out if she needed it. But in terms of her day to day care. I mean, she had been doing it for like two three decades at that point. So I only intervened when, when it was necessary. Basically.

Scott Benner 11:02
Did your mom have any real emergencies while you were growing up?

Tara Caudill 11:05
When I was 12, I think I was 12. So this would have been mid 2000s. There was one night my dad's been in rock and roll bands since before I was born. And he was gone one night playing a gig. And so whenever he would be gone, play a gig that night, I would stay in the room with my mom. And it just so happened this one particular night, I'll never forget it. I watched the clock strikes 12 at midnight. And then I felt the bed start shaking. And her I looked over at her and her arm was shaking, and she couldn't really talk. She wasn't having it wasn't like a full blown seizure. But her body was definitely like, Yo, you, you need to do something. And so thankfully, we had talked about it before. And so I ran over to her nightstand and I got her. I remember if something soft that she could eat or I don't think it was juice in her nightstand or anything. But uh, I helped her get that down and helped her check her sugar and called 911. And then in like, I don't know, 2030 minutes an ambulance showed up just to check her and she was okay.

Scott Benner 12:17
I had a hard time listening to that story because you said that you were 12 in the mid 2000s. And it made me feel really old.

Tara Caudill 12:25
I'm sorry. I'm so confused. I

Scott Benner 12:27
was like, I'm like, No way. No one's young, then like as like a god. Tara, how old are you?

Tara Caudill 12:33
I'm 28 Oh, my God. Terrible.

Scott Benner 12:37
Terrible for me. It's good for you. So you've got this experience with your mom, does that come into your head? Once you realize your son has type one?

Tara Caudill 12:46
It does. Because at that point, that's all that I had to go on. Right?

Scott Benner 12:50
So did so was that your expectation? Or? I mean, what could you even i This is a weird question. But could you even enjoy that day? Or is that day last?

Tara Caudill 13:02
Out? No, we were still very much able to enjoy it. Matthias was he was smiling at some point. I was able to just kind of sit with him and hold him. We didn't really walk around the whole a whole lot of places. We just kind of sat there and enjoyed enjoyed finally being together, you know, after it was like 10 weeks. So I was finally able to kind of feel like a mom again, which I hadn't felt like a mom in a long time at that point. And then so we had our family day, and then the next day it was graduation. And because of some scheduling mishaps with the battalion that I was assigned to, we got one extra day, which never ever happened. But their their loss was my game. So I obviously took the extra day. Hey, um, remind

Scott Benner 13:52
Chad Chad is the military as well. Right? Was Yes. Yeah, he still is yes. And are you as well? Yes. Okay, so how does that work? Like for scheduling? And like, are you not home for stretches of time? Is he not home for stretches of time.

Tara Caudill 14:10
So he's active duty, and I am in the reserve. So we're we're in the middle of pcse, which means permanent change of station. We actually just got to Texas this week. So I finished up my annual training with my unit in Georgia, and then kind of just, you know, waved at everybody and said, you know, I'll see you later. And so I'm in the middle of trying to transfer units right now. And that way I can stay local to the unit just because it's easier for the kids.

Scott Benner 14:40
Because if next time you have to go back you have to go back to Georgia. Yes. And Chad So, Chad's in Texas, he's, he's active in Texas.

Tara Caudill 14:52
Mm hmm. Yeah, he just finishes his like job as a recruiter and the army norm He kind of made him do it. He didn't really want to. But so now he's back here. And once his leave is over here and like the next week or so, he'll be going back to his regular, his regular army job as a cab scout.

Unknown Speaker 15:14
What is that?

Tara Caudill 15:16
Cavalry scout? They're like the eyes and the ears of the commander on the battlefield.

Scott Benner 15:20
Okay. Yeah. Project manager.

Tara Caudill 15:25
That's one way to look at it.

Scott Benner 15:27
It's an odd way to look at it. But it's the first thing that I thought of. And what did you What was your specialty? When, what? What do you do?

Tara Caudill 15:35
So I'm an intel analyst.

Scott Benner 15:38
Interesting. Does that help with the diabetes at all?

Tara Caudill 15:44
Um, it can now that it's another way that I've learned to think critically about the information that I have. So I can I'm getting better at being able to go okay, what is happening here? And then what are the changes that need to occur so that this low or this high doesn't happen again,

Scott Benner 16:05
kind of Gotcha. Are you having luck with that? Are you having more long stretches of stability with blood sugar's?

Tara Caudill 16:13
I think we're in the middle of his Basal needing to be changed, because I had to bump it up the other night, and it worked fantastic. And I was like, Okay, I might be on to something. And then last night, it was causing him to try and go low a little bit, so we'll just have to tinker with it some more until we get it stable again.

Scott Benner 16:32
Okay. Has your mom because your mom was diagnosed in a different era of diabetes, obviously, but Has she had any insight that's been valuable? Or has it been the opposite? And what you're learning about Matthias is helping your mom or do you guys not talk about it?

Tara Caudill 16:50
Oh, we talk about it all the time. Okay. All the time. Especially when he was, you know, first diagnosed because I wasn't home. Like I saw them for the three days. And then I left Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and then I went to Fort

Scott Benner 17:09
tear you broke up

she'll be back. She's a little bit of a connection show. If I had a bugle I could play Reveley while we were waiting, but no, I'll try with my hands. Tara

that's all I remember. I don't know if that was right. Alright, she's gonna bounce back in a second. Hello. You left for Jackson?

Tara Caudill 17:43
Yes. So I left for Jackson. My bad.

Scott Benner 17:46
No, don't worry about it. I am assuming that they moved you into the middle of like the Texas desert or something like that. Or you're like out west or where are you at?

Tara Caudill 17:55
Now we're in a clean right outside Fort Hood.

Scott Benner 17:58
Okay. Well, they need better internet there.

Tara Caudill 18:01
They do. Yes, I agree. I just I just moved my phone to the opposite side of the house. So hopefully that'll help.

Scott Benner 18:07
Oh, no kidding. Okay, go. Well, I have my fingers crossed. But you were saying you had just left for Jackson, which made me think of Janet Jackson song where she calls herself Miss Jackson. And then you disappeared.

Tara Caudill 18:20
Yeah, so I left for Jackson and then went to Arizona. And I was there from, I think the end of February until the end of June. And then I finally came home the end of June of 2019. And that's when I really started to be able to dive, dive into the diocese care and my mom's my mom's perspective and her experience and everything with that. She had already told Chad so much. But even in a it where I got a little bit more freedom, I could call home every night if I wanted that there's just so much time that you know we had to do for learning our job and whatnot that it didn't really happen all that often. So when I when I was finally able to go home, I called my mom probably every day, or at least texted her and was like okay, I'm doing this just is like another witness while Chad was gone at work. Oh, hey, I'm gonna do I'm gonna do this. So

Scott Benner 19:24
if anybody has any reasons why these two shouldn't get married speak now for like, if anybody has a thought I want to hear it right this second. So you felt very uncertain for a while.

Tara Caudill 19:34
For probably the first few days at least? Yeah. Just where this was. This wasn't you know, helping my mom who could tell me yes or no, this was helping my two year old who could barely say hello. You know, so when Chad left for work, the first day after I got back home he he looked at me and he was like so I'm not trying to sound like I don't trust you. But please call me every time you're going to Bolus every time you're going to feed him. That way I can be like, yes, no, heck no. What are you doing? So on and so forth. And I was he, I was like, that's perfectly fine, because I don't want him to go into the hospital again. And especially, it'd be my fault.

Scott Benner 20:23
Your fault. Interesting. How long was Chad, the sole caregiver of the diabetes before you were home?

Tara Caudill 20:34
So February, March, April, May, June, but for four months, okay, give or take.

Scott Benner 20:42
Okay, yeah. So by then, it must have been incredibly difficult for him to just hand the thighs over to a different person, like, forget that was you just the two different person once he probably started feeling like I understand this a little bit. And I know how hard it was to figure out this much. And now she's gonna start over. And then the specter of what could go wrong just lives in your head. That said, that's interesting. You guys didn't actually get to do it at the same time. But looking back, do you think that was a benefit? Or do you think it slowed down your progress?

Tara Caudill 21:18
I think it ended up being a long term benefit, because it forced me to have to be able to eventually do this on my own.

Scott Benner 21:26
Okay. And you got you got the benefit of what he had figured out already. So you weren't starting at zero? You started a little bit in the On the plus side. But does what he says jive with how you think or do you have to remaster it for yourself she's gone again and that was such a good question.

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I don't want to forget the QUESTION All right. What I said was you guys should try talking off the top of your head like this for an hour it's not easy did hearing his thing make it easier? And what happens when not doing the bugle find your young kids. You wonder it's not happening. I'm just talking to myself because you're not ever gonna hear us

don't wake up didn't Tintin. Tintin. Tintin? That's the second part of it. I know this from Mash God, you know, man, I'm leaving the sun. Hey, Scott. Hey, get some tinfoil wrapped around your head.

Tara Caudill 24:58
Right. I think I I think what I'm gonna do, just to see if this will make it easier is I'm going to use my phone as a hotspot because I should still have zoom on my laptop, okay? And our hotspot right and laptop with my phone and try and jump on there and hopefully it won't, it won't keep disconnecting because we have T Mobile, and T Mobile is apparently not super good in this area.

Scott Benner 25:22
Perfect for you. So, right, um, do you didn't need to jump off and jump back on?

Tara Caudill 25:28
I'll see if I can sign in on here. Okay. And then

Scott Benner 25:33
I'd such a good question. Just read. I'm like just all I'm doing is sitting here trying to remember my question.

Tara Caudill 25:39
Okay. I'll stay quiet. No, no, no, no,

Scott Benner 25:42
I've already. I've already played Reveley on my hand bugle twice. So nice. As much as I can remember from Mash.

Tara Caudill 25:49
Oh, I used to watch mash sometimes.

Scott Benner 25:51
Yeah, you're young, you wouldn't enjoy it. I love the mash.

Tara Caudill 25:55
I just remember that radio was the only original character radar. Or radar doesn't radio. But he's

Scott Benner 26:02
not the only original character. Oh, you mean the only real actor from the movie? Actor? Yes. Yes.

Tara Caudill 26:07
Yeah. All right, let me see. Pull up my email here. Chris. My emails taking forever. Just box,

Scott Benner 26:16
click this link you're needing to my mom just texted me. How's the podcast? Not great. I'm gonna admit you, but we're gonna get some weird sound stuff. You should jump off on the phone now.

Tara Caudill 26:44
All right, what about now?

Scott Benner 26:46
Well, let's talk for a second to find out. Alrighty. Let me uh, let me ask my question again. We'll see where that goes. Okay, so I was wondering if Chad's experiences were helpful for you in the beginning, because sort of like a launch spot. But but then I was more interested in whether his stuff one to one translated to you, or if you had to kind of hear what he was saying, and then re engineer it so that it worked for your brain.

Tara Caudill 27:21
I definitely had to do some relearning just from growing up with my mom as a type one. One because now I was the caregiver. Or one of the caregivers. And with my mom, I wasn't I was, you know, I was there to help her if she needed it. But most of the time she didn't. So when it came to some of the advice that my mom would give, it wasn't that she was wrong. It was just That's how she had always done it. And she's a grown woman, not a, you know, a two year old. So there were things that we had to, you know, figure out, Okay, what if we take her advice, but just like re engineer it? Kind of to like use your words. So that it would so that it would work for Matthias especially when he was still MDI.

Scott Benner 28:09
Okay, so he it's interesting. So your husband has no background in diabetes at all. He at least knows your mom had it? And has it understands your way. Is Chad, like in a normal situation where all three of you are together? If this happened? Who would this have fallen to?

Tara Caudill 28:33
I think it would have been fairly split between the both of us that's that's how it is pretty much now.

Scott Benner 28:40
So you think even in that moment, you guys would have split the duties up? It wouldn't have been like here, this is more you or more him?

Tara Caudill 28:48
Yeah, I think it would have it would have still been 5050 as much as possible.

Scott Benner 28:51
Okay, cool. So you guys do everything like that.

Tara Caudill 28:57
With me everything with like life, the type one No, just like I think when I think when we recognize, hey, someone is more up to speed in this area, we kind of, we kind of let the other person teach us, you know, or, or vice versa. And then when it's time for the other person to step up to the plate, we're like, alright, you know, go out there and do your thing. And then

Scott Benner 29:21
you guys have a good relationship like this, the army help you with that, that idea of working in a team.

Tara Caudill 29:28
More so now because a lot of a lot of the ways that he talks, some of the just the lingo and just the way that his mind works now. He's been in for 10 years at this point. So now that now that I've gone through basic and the it and I've just been with my unit for a couple years now. There's conversations that we're able to have that flow more easily just because we are both in the military now.

Scott Benner 29:53
Yeah, I imagine you guys planning on having other children

Tara Caudill 29:59
so When Chad did his episode, I was getting ready to have our second born.

Scott Benner 30:06
Oh, baby. How old is the baby now?

Tara Caudill 30:09
He is six months old.

Scott Benner 30:10
Oh, good for you. It's exciting, or is it? A lot of work? And you're like, Oh my God?

Tara Caudill 30:17
Oh, no, it's it's definitely exciting. It is a lot of work. I mean, I've never had two kids before. So

Scott Benner 30:22
yeah, are you? Do you have a level of concern about your newest for type one? Or how does that strike you?

Tara Caudill 30:32
We really don't, I mean, we're aware of it. But it's, we're not plagued by the paranoia of it. And we're doing our best to keep it that way. When we found out that I was pregnant, we talked about doing the testing to try and figure out like, what, like, what chances he would have of developing it. And then we kind of just let the conversation go and just kind of enjoyed, you know, getting ready to have a second baby. And then after he was born, we talked about it again, and we we just kind of determined we're, you know, we're more aware of like the symptoms and kind of what to look for. So we weren't going to, we weren't going to what could be just wasting time, just waiting, you know, to end up having to take him to the ER. And that kind of came, that was one area where my mom was really able to help. Because when I was born, you know, it was pretty rare for a type one diabetic to have a healthy pregnancy, let alone the baby end up not having any complications or anything like that. So when I was born, and then as I started growing up, my mom would take me to the pediatrician. And she would ask, you know, what are the chances of, of terror developing type one. And my pediatrician always told her, there's a test that you can do to find out, but unless you unless you really, really want to know, she might never ever develop it, they said that there was probably like less than a 4% chance that I would ever develop it. So my doctor's advice to my mom was just enjoyed the time because if you do the test, and you spend all that time wondering, you're, you're going to be 70 And your daughter is going to be 50. And you're going to be on your deathbed going man, I didn't get to enjoy any of the childhood because I was just waiting for the tragedy, quote, unquote. And I'm almost 30 And I've, I've never in no way developed

Scott Benner 32:42
it. Right. So she just was able to take that advice and, and live that way. And you're gonna do the same thing. Cool. Oh, I listen. I think there's, there's a couple of different ways to think about it. And I feel like all of them are very valid. And that what you just described is one way that I hear people talk about it. So I think that's perfect. I was just wondering your perspective on it. That's a that's something so you guys have a young family, you've just really paid relocated to Texas. Do you think you're gonna get to stay in Texas? Or do you think you're gonna have to bounce again?

Tara Caudill 33:14
We'll have to bounce again. But we'll be in Texas for at least a few years. Okay.

Scott Benner 33:18
That's pretty cool. Is that just standard military life? That's never gonna change?

Tara Caudill 33:27
Uh, yeah, pretty much.

Scott Benner 33:30
And so. Okay, so Chad's active, so he might have to move around a lot, which makes you have to get find your way into the reserves wherever he lands. And are you in military housing? Or do you own your own house? How does that work?

Tara Caudill 33:48
We actually just bought our first house we closed on it this week. And you're

Scott Benner 33:51
in it right now.

Tara Caudill 33:55
Yeah, we're just waiting for our household goods. So we're we're still working with the air mattress situation and and all that good stuff.

Scott Benner 34:04
Is Matthias having fun. Is it like sleeping over for a while?

Tara Caudill 34:08
Yeah, he seems to be enjoying himself. We actually just got him his first actual like, big boy bed not toddler themed or anything so. So he's not sleeping in his little monkey sleeping bag anymore.

Scott Benner 34:21
What's he about? Like five or six now?

Tara Caudill 34:24
He's four. Now four.

Scott Benner 34:25
Wow. Why did time feel like it move faster for me then? Like I was just thinking about? I guess it was only 2020 when Chad was on. I see. I think I think ahead so much about the podcast in my mind. It's 2022 already. So I'm like adding two years to his age and thinking like he's gonna be five or six. Right? So he's four. So how's he doing? Like, how is how is diabetes going?

Tara Caudill 34:52
Ah, it it's going pretty well. He had his last endo appointment in Atlanta. It was As to it was last Friday. And his a one C I think it was 5.5, I think is what Chad told me. That's so cool. With like, I think like 80 to 90% time and range somewhere around there.

Scott Benner 35:16
I liked it. It's so much in the fives that you're like, I don't know, it's like a five and a half. Mr. Chad took him to his appointment. You were not with him was that? Does that kind of normal? Does just one of you do it? Do not usually both go

Tara Caudill 35:31
on normally, because the couple of times that I've had to take him Chad would be working at his recruiting station. And then this past time Chad had to take him because it was my last day of annual training with my unit. So I had to go there.

Scott Benner 35:43
Okay, so whoever's available goes, I Yeah, thinking I don't think Kelly's been to like, maybe three appointments ever. Like it just doesn't work that way for us. Like she's usually working and, and I'm doing stuff like that. So that's interesting. Like, you guys can just easily switch off and back and forth. So does he come home? And like, I guess not right, like things are going well, but it's not like he comes home and gives you the report. I guess he just didn't like, Go, is it kind of like that? Yeah,

Tara Caudill 36:13
pretty much. I mean, if if there's, there's always like the paperwork that the end knows will give, you know, at the end of the appointment. And so I might look over the paperwork, and you know, make sure that whatever prescriptions need to be renewed. We're on there and whatnot. But before we moved, we actually were pretty fortunate. And we got a buttload of pods and DEX columns, and we got a handful of, you know, new vials of insulin and stuff. So, so we were set for when we were getting ready to hit the road.

Scott Benner 36:44
I'm plus, no matter how good Chad is this, he's still a boy. So you have to double check on him. Because, right? I mean, we do we

Tara Caudill 36:51
know he, he's very much. So I cannot brag on Chad enough. I really can't. Whenever I tell people about our, you know, our little experience with masseuses diagnosis, I have to remind people if you'd like I was gone. You know, Chad really had to step up to the plate and make it work and he did in more ways than than I could have ever imagined. And so then when they came for my family day, right after with ISIS diagnosis, I could not hug him and hold him and just tell him enough I'm thankful that he is with irises dad and not some some other man who whether it be due to fear, or just a lack of concern would not have handled it as as well and continues to handle it as well as Chad does.

Scott Benner 37:42
I remember being really impressed when I was talking with him. And even your your recollection of it makes that more so for me. So that sounds very sweet. But you could kill me like six different ways. Right? How are they taught? You?

Tara Caudill 37:55
Know, that's not really my job.

Scott Benner 37:58
They don't make you understand that a little bit. Yeah,

Tara Caudill 38:01
I understand it. But I'm not. I'm not like boots on the ground. That's not That's not my

Scott Benner 38:06
alright, but I feel like if I ran it, you you would punch me in the face and I'd fall over? Is this true or no? Just like think you'd run away and be like, I'm trying to analyze data. Could someone stop this guy from running it? Throwing my clipboard at you I've analyzed the situation and someone with a gun better get over here. Right?

Tara Caudill 38:31
No, like real talk. Like if it's if the fight is getting bad enough to where I have to pull out my rifle, then we're losing. Now not because, you know, not because, you know, I don't even know how to describe it. But that's that's just not my I'm not outside the wire

Scott Benner 38:49
when the people have to go find their gun. And it's under something that those are not the people you want. And

Tara Caudill 38:57
exactly everyone else has died.

Scott Benner 39:00
Under the bar. Hold on a second. Can everybody wait? I don't remember where I put it. Yeah, I have to save this thing I'm working on I want to lose all this work. Right. Now. That's the military really is just like a big business, right? People just do different things. And there's different sections and people who don't know one thing about the other side of something else. Yeah, I mean, it makes sense. Just that you know, in your mind you're like, it's it's hard to imagine for somebody who's never been involved in it.

Tara Caudill 39:29
In the movies, everyone, everyone in the movies is infantry. And that's just not true. I mean, we're all taught, you know, basic combat training, but

Scott Benner 39:37
Right. Gotcha. Maybe you could get out of a scuffle on a 711 Okay, better than me. Yeah. Yeah, I could do that. I could do. Yeah, I don't know. That's kind of there's something great about just understanding how to protect yourself a little bit. That is a it's interesting to me. Do you think that little Going forward, I know this is tough, you're such a young family, but Mathias can't join the military right? Now, do you think that's gonna be an issue? One day?

Tara Caudill 40:12
I have thought about it. He has definitely pulled out like his little Nerf guns and be like, Mom, I'm a soldier like you and daddy, and it like, warms my heart. And then you know, you kind of have that moment where you're like, but you can't really be one. But he's four, just kind of, yeah, you just kind of let him run with it. I mean, we definitely don't want to be the parents who go, you know, you have type one, like, you can't do this, like we let him. We let them do stuff like every other four year old and we just try to manage it so that he can do all of those things. And if we have to call him over to give him a tab or something, it's two seconds out of his play time. And then he just goes right back over.

Scott Benner 40:51
I imagine there's a time when he'll have better understanding that you'll that you'll say it to him differently. But I have to agree, I don't know that trying to explain to a four year old that you can't serve in the military, because the diabetes is is a valuable use of anybody's time or effort. Yeah, cuz he's not going to take it correctly. And then he's going to start wondering what else he can't do. And it just happens that he picked the one thing that he can't do like to ask you. I mean, you don't want to give him the feeling. There's so many other things because I can't think of anything else really. You know, even the being a pilot thing seems to be going the right way.

Tara Caudill 41:28
We have told him that. As he went through a big plane phase, we live near an airport in Georgia. And every day is like mama has a play. And I'm like you want to be a pilot. But you go ahead and you be a pilot. He's like, Okay, I'll be a pilot.

Scott Benner 41:42
So great. When they're little, you could pretty much get them to say you're doing thing. You want to be a pilot was

Tara Caudill 41:48
in? He wasn't. We got him enrolled into like a taekwondo class last October. And so he did taekwondo at this at this studio. Not too far from our house up until we moved. Was he enjoying it? Oh, yeah, he loved it, he was actually able to be accelerated so that he could get his tiny Tiger black belt before we moved. Oh,

Scott Benner 42:14
that's cool. tinies Hydra black belt, probably the name of the episode. That's fantastic. Amazing. So he's just out there rolling around with other four year olds, and they're like working on moves and trying to understand like the real basic stuff. That's amazing. Yeah. How was that on his blood sugar? Oh,

Tara Caudill 42:35
it was it was pretty well, we definitely tried to do our best to monitor when he first got there, just because we didn't know exactly how the class was going to work. But uh, you know, there would be times it was only for 30 minutes. So I mean, we weren't able to see any super long term effects, because he would be running for an hour or anything like that. But especially if there were days where they did the obstacle course that they had set up for more than 1015 minutes, you could sometimes start to see, okay, we got to, we got to pull back or push forward on the Basal just kind of whatever, especially with him being so small.

Scott Benner 43:14
He has little, how much does he weigh?

Tara Caudill 43:17
He's around 40. I think 40 pounds now.

Scott Benner 43:21
Oh, I remember. My kids being small like that. It's so nice. It's hard to to look, I'm starting to get to that age where it's like, pretty obvious. I can't have kids. You don't I mean, like, just because of my age. And I don't I don't want to be 75 If someone's like, you know, assuming I can make it to 75. I don't want to be 75. It's somebody like high school graduation. It's sad. Like you think like, oh, like I never thought we were going to have more kids. And yet now, knowing that it really can't happen or won't happen is it makes you think back to all this stuff. It's interesting to hear you talk about do you think he'll keep doing the taekwondo who you find we look for a dojo in Texas.

Tara Caudill 44:02
Yeah, he said he wants to keep doing it. So I'm actually trying to get into jujitsu once we get settled down. And, you know, like, redo our budget. And so if he doesn't want to do taekwondo, you know, he has told me he wants to try jujitsu. Not that he knows what the differences are. But uh, they have kid classes at the gym that I was looking at. So if he wants to try that he can do that. He said he wanted to do a dance class at one point, and I was like, you could but we've already paid for taekwondo. So let's just keep doing that. Okay,

Scott Benner 44:32
let's finish something up first, and then we'll start Yeah, thanks. Oh, wait, do you see I was just telling. I was just yesterday on the phone, ordering training equipment that my son needs. And the guy and I'm looking at the price I'm like, oh my god, like I'm like getting ready to give the guy the credit card. And I just said to him, he's a younger guy. And I was like, Look, you're gonna have kids one day and they're gonna want to play baseball, maybe and Just remember, if that happens that 20 years later, you're still going to be involved in buying stuff for baseball, standing on fields getting weird tans, not going on vacation, because that's when baseball is played. I was like, that's a big step. I was like when your kid asks for baseball, like really make sure you mean to say yes. Because it's like a lifelong if you keep playing. It's a it's a lifelong, you know, commitment. I like the idea about jujitsu like you just like skip a class and go on vacation and come back and do it again. That sounds that sounds enticing to me. I'm starting to think if I could go back in time, I'd be like, what about this? You know, like, Would you like to look over here instead? I didn't realize when I was young that baseball gets played when everyone's on vacation. So if you play baseball, you don't go on vacation? Like little summers playing baseball. Yeah, you know what I mean? You're just like, wow, and plus my arms get really tan. And then my shoulders are white. I look silly when I take my shirt off. So anyway, well, you guys have a really, I mean, for as crazy as your launch into this was, now's going pretty smoothly. So what is it you're doing that's, that's working. So on a five, five for a four year olds pretty impressive.

Tara Caudill 46:21
Having your podcast in your resources has definitely been the biggest help Chad introduced it to me when I was in AI, T, back in 2019. And so and then he got Messiah set up on the Dexcom. And so he introduced me to like the share app and everything with that. But uh, I was gone. And in class so often for learning my job that I didn't really get to watch his sugar throughout the day. And so I was more. It was more just kind of Chad learning stuff at home and implementing it, you know, like, the same day or shortly after, and then telling me, like, Hey, I learned about this today, I'll never forget when he told me about Pre-Bolus thing. It rocked my world really how it rocked my world. Because with my mom Pre-Bolus thing was never a thing. It was just it wasn't like a bad word or anything. It was just, it wasn't a concept. Yeah. And so then when Chad told me, he was like, hey, you know, like, I heard this podcast and this guy talks about Pre-Bolus. And I was like, What in the world? What is that? He said, You give the insulin before they eat, and you try to time it so that when the insulin starts working, it kind of like fights the carbs in the food. And I was like, That's genius. It's like, why is this not a thing? Like, why don't they teach you that coming out of the hospital? He's like, Well, he's like, I kind of get why they don't do it. But it's definitely more useful than waiting for him to go high. And they go, Oh, okay, now he needs this much. And then and then just missing it all together. Yeah. So then Pre-Bolus He was definitely the biggest help. And we got him on the Omnipod dash, like the week I got home from it. So that was my first appointment that I went to and actually funny story. Jenny Smith was the one who taught us and trained us for the Omni pod.

Scott Benner 48:24
He used integrated for that.

Tara Caudill 48:27
I had no idea what it was at the time. She was just the one who was at a children's hospital of Atlanta. And we walked in for our appointment to get him set up on the pod. And she's like, hi, you know, I'm, I'm Jenny Smith. I'm going to be training you for the Omni pod today. And then it was probably a week or two later. I guess Jenny was on one of your episodes. And Chad was like, I think this is the same Jenny who helped us with Don.

Scott Benner 48:52
I have to tell you like what it's very likely not Jenny doesn't live in Atlanta. Reality Yeah, you might have a different Jenny Smith. Is there another Jenny Smith out there that works in diabetes? Please contact me. Super interesting episode. Yeah, Jenny lives in Wisconsin.

Tara Caudill 49:11
I thought maybe she had just like traveled for something and was in the area or some I

Scott Benner 49:15
don't know. Tiny woman. Very happy. Jenny was in it. Yeah, I'm gonna ask her if she was in Atlanta doing something. And that was, that would be it would

Tara Caudill 49:25
have been. It would have been the summer of 2019 All right, I can July she's

Scott Benner 49:30
gonna laugh she laughs every time I asked her something so she'll laugh. And then she'll be either telling me like that was me or no, that was not me. And I will let you know.

Tara Caudill 49:38
There's gonna be more intriguing if it wasn't her because I'm gonna be like, Oh my gosh, she was that

Scott Benner 49:43
it's another Jenny. And she did she worked for the hospital or for the for Omnipod

Tara Caudill 49:51
I'm really not sure that was the only time that we ever met her. Yeah, every every other time we went there. It was either his regular and no or one of the like.

Scott Benner 50:00
All right, so I'm going to tell you, it's likely not her because she doesn't work for an institution. And she doesn't work from the pod. So Gotcha. If that is fascinating, the other Jenny Smith, I swear it was a Jimmy Smith, we might have knocked off the title of the episode and come up with another one. Interesting. Although

Tara Caudill 50:19
I remember she she was also on the Omni pod because Matthias was trying to mess with her PDM and we're like, buddy, like, No, dude, don't do that. You're gonna mess it up. And she's like, Ah, he can't hurt it. And I was like, because at first I thought it was just like a demo Omnipod that she had and then it and then I realized, no, it was actually her pump. And I was like, okay,

Scott Benner 50:37
alright, so I'm now googling because I'm fascinated. Was she? Does she have dark hair? She did. Yeah, I don't. It's so that's definitely not Jenny. Jenny has lighter hair. But I'm looking at a LinkedIn profile. Jenny Smith, clinical services manager, diabetes nurse educator, Georgia, clinical service manager for insolate starting in 2019. insulet. Makes Omni pod. Okay, Jenny, if you want to be on the podcast, and you ever hear this, you can come on because now I want to talk to you about this.

Tara Caudill 51:12
This is like Jenny inception. What is happening?

Scott Benner 51:17
Are you just a you're not just over there trying to name the episode at this point, are you? I'm not know. Because Jenny Inception is tight. That's gonna be that one I wrote down. You knocked off the little tiger blackbelt blend. But anyway, now I'm just interested in the power of the podcast. I'm not now I'm interested. If I hear from Jenny Smith, who works for Omni pod. I want to find out if it reaches her or not. Isn't that fascinating? Okay. Yeah. And this kind of be a common name No, Jennifer might be. I mean, Jennifer was pretty

Tara Caudill 51:51
common for me growing up and then Smith, it's just a common last name all together.

Scott Benner 51:55
Yeah, I can't wait to tell Jenny about this. She's gonna be she's gonna be just, like, enthralled with this idea. So your suggest Pre-Bolus thing was a big deal to you? Very much so and not something anyone else had talked to you about? Okay. And now moving forward. I mean, a five, five indicates a really good grasp, or you're having a lot of lows. And you're not telling me but I don't think that's the case. So now, do you have a firm grasp of what you're doing?

Tara Caudill 52:27
I like to think so. Yeah. I

Scott Benner 52:29
mean, you have to if you're five, five. I mean, he's not eating like sawdust or something. Right? Like he's eating. You're not feeding them. Just like, you know, here eat this. It'll fill your belly. It's like real lazy eating like a fairly like American. I mean, you're in Texas, right? Like you probably eat. Like you probably kill things with your hands and then cook it on a grill and stuff like that. Like you've been in Texas, five seconds. You're like, I don't know what they do here.

Tara Caudill 52:55
We were here once before Chad. Chad's actually been stationed here before, but I only lived here with him for two months. And then we PCs to Hawaii where Matthias was actually born.

Scott Benner 53:05
That sounds better. Not that Texas. Sounds bad. But Hawaii sounds great. Yeah, okay. So I mean, but he's eating a fairly American diet, I imagine.

Tara Caudill 53:16
Oh, yeah, we do try to keep it more healthy. Like, instead of just shoving glucose tabs down his throat and figured out we could give him a handful of grapes, like however many. And it essentially worked the same way. So that way, he wasn't getting district sugar. He was also getting some nutrition. So try to sneak it in when we can.

Scott Benner 53:35
Right. I heard somewhere recently that that grapes hit pretty hard on the glycaemic their glycemic loads pretty hard. Where that might have been anecdotal. But that makes sense to me that it would work for a low, and if he can eat them, then cool. You know? Yeah, I agree better than a than a tablet. But I mean, seriously. So you have like stability overnight at a lower number, I'd imagine right?

Tara Caudill 54:02
Yeah, with the exception of I think his Basal were just in that funky time where it might need to be adjusted again, for a while it was at about a quarter unit throughout the night. And that seemed not I'd say about nine times out of 10. That seemed to work unless we just missed, you know, some protein or fat from dinner. And then he had to fight that off forever.

Scott Benner 54:27
But I'm saying like, generally speaking, you see the bill. I'm just guessing, do you because I'm maybe I'm wrong. But do you see stability overnight more in the 80s and 90s than not? Yeah, I would say so. Yeah, I mean, because five, five, the way you get to a five five is pretty is pretty common. You have to have, excuse me overnight stability. That's more in the 80s. You have to not see a lot of spikes at meal time. And you have to be in a situation where you're not correcting a lot of lows. Food. Does that describe your life? Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. Wow, you got all that from the podcast? Yeah. Cool. That's a really amazing. I don't even know.

Tara Caudill 55:14
Chad also found the sugar surfing book a long time ago. Okay. And so and so he read that and that really helped him good. And then we actually learned what I really learned the other day, the doctor who wrote that book. He's actually just over in temple, which is like, 45 minutes away from here. So we're definitely going to try and get him as the diocese and No, but

Scott Benner 55:36
that's cool. Yeah, he's in Texas. He was on the show, like at the very beginning of the show. I remember that. Yeah. i It's been like, it's got to be seven years ago. But I always enjoy telling the story that like he was only on because listeners asked for him. Like I didn't I had never heard of him before. Not to say that. That's a distinction, but I just didn't know who he was. And a couple of listeners that can you get this guy, he wrote this book. And he comes on. And he's talking and I remember being 1015 minutes of the episode, and just like blurting out to him, like, you do what I do, you just call it something like I was it struck me in that I was like, oh my god, like, he knows this too. I was like, This is so cool. Get you know, so really interesting, and, and, by all accounts, a lovely man, so that if you could get him, I think that that'd be really great. I mean, he you'd probably he'd walk in, you'd walk in there, and he'd be like, you guys know what you're doing? And that'd be that. But no, I mean, now that you have some proximity to him, that'd be really cool. Excellent. Well, I'm just thrilled you guys are doing well. Like your story's incredibly uncommon in the way it happened. But it's fascinating and in how quickly you guys pull it all together. You know, like, really? It's, it's, it's laudable. Do you ever, like sit back and take a minute to be proud of yourselves?

Tara Caudill 56:59
We have done that before. Yeah. I feel like if I get wrapped up in how well things go, then the next minute it just, it gets out of hand. Because some days you have you have like a handful of days where you almost start to feel like yeah, I really, I really got this down like, I am the PDM you know, I am the insulin and then the next day, it just kicks you in the butt and you're like, I should not I should have just let it be. I should just wave that it is a web by should have never made a big fuss about it.

Scott Benner 57:31
You feel like the world is seeing you celebrate that. And karma is like hold on. We'll just We'll fix this up for you. Just watch this. People say that. People say all the time, like the minute I take a screen capture and I share something with somebody it goes wrong. And I'm sure that's just you know, Murphy's law. But uh, you know, I don't imagine that you celebrating what's going on is, is actually leading to another by the way if anyone thinks that I think you should talk to a therapist, I believe there's there's a that's a mental illness. So you, you can't control the world with your thoughts if you could be much taller and more handsome, and younger. And there'd be a lot that would change. If I could just change the world with my thoughts. I think. That's cool. You guys are just like a great like, young family success story. It's really, really, really great to hear. Is there anything we didn't talk about that you were hoping we would?

Tara Caudill 58:29
Oh, I wanted to let you know that when our second son was born. We named him Scott.

Scott Benner 58:35
Get out of here. Are you serious? You're lying. No,

Tara Caudill 58:38
his name is Nate Gabriel.

Scott Benner 58:40
I knew you were lying. I knew it and I let myself be excited. Anyway. That was mean, Tara

Tara Caudill 58:47
told me to do it. blame him. Jewelry. I said this. I said it as a joke last night and he was like, No, you got to do it. I love it. You tell him

Scott Benner 58:55
I said I told him I said that was hard as you said and I was like she's kidding. And then I'm like What if she's not kidding and I don't act really happy about this.

Tara Caudill 59:13
Jen says hi by the way. Oh

Scott Benner 59:14
yeah. Thanks a lot. That's hilarious. I'm so sorry. I couldn't help it. You did such a good job selling it Are you good liar? Generally? No, not at all. You really leaned into You're very good. Excellent. Oh, I'm smiling so much. That's so funny. Good. Oh, that's fantastic. You guys plan that out? I appreciate that. I do no problem. We're here for us. God I can see it that you guys are just there as my little support system I appreciate. I I can't tell you how amazed and thrilled I am for how well things are going for you guys and I know your your start was rocky but you guys really are are doing a great job. Just remember tell Chad I said kid's going to start growing and he's going to get hormones and things are going to happen and he just has to you guys just have to stay, like just flexible and just move with it meet the need, and you'll be okay. You know, I will definitely pass that on. Yeah, but you got some years before that kid starts popping up and really, I think putting on the bulk wait. I don't think he's gonna think he's gonna be like a little killer when he's seven. So I think you'll be okay for a little while. But that's really something and congratulations on the Baby. Baby. Gabriel. Just, I knew even with like, there's no way you were gonna go to something not traditional, like you guys have like, I mean, those are fairly biblical names that you've chosen, right? Yeah, you weren't gonna go to Scott. I know.

Tara Caudill 1:00:48
Damn it. I do have a cousin named Scott.

Scott Benner 1:00:52
One little bit I should have just let it be. Care about your cousin at all? What do you think of that? diabetes, then tell him I really like that.

Tara Caudill 1:01:06
He doesn't, but my mom is the middle child of three. And she has an older sister and a younger brother. And neither one of them have ever developed it. She's the only one on my side of the family that we have ever found that has it?

Scott Benner 1:01:19
I know. We're never going to know the answer to this empirically on the podcast, but and I don't wish this on you. But I wonder if it's gonna skip generations in your family? Like, I wonder if you have no idea. Yeah, like, I wonder if you'll be the grandmother of a type one one day or something like that. Not that I hope that happens. I'm just I, you know, sometimes it's you wish you had more time on the planet. So you could step back and see how things really, you know what I mean? How they transpire? I feel like that, but maybe other people don't.

Tara Caudill 1:01:49
Remember, I remember Chad told me when they were in the diabetes class in the hospital. Like the very first thing he told Chad was this is not your fault. You did not, you know, pump him full of sugar and kill his pancreas. They were like this, chances are this was going to happen. We just unfortunately didn't know. And another thing they told him was at that time, at least, I don't know, with all the research that's been coming out that in the past couple of years, that they believed that for a person to be able to develop Type One is that the gene had to come from both parents.

Scott Benner 1:02:28
Really, but that that's the case.

Tara Caudill 1:02:32
That's what are understood at that time. Anyway, when he was first diagnosed, that's what our understanding of it was. So before I heard that I was I was still at Fort Jackson. And then when we found out and I had, like, my, I had my breakdown moment, I thought that I gave it to him. And I was I was devastated. I was like, you know, of course hindsight, there's nothing that I could have done anyway, or that we could have done. Like, once the dial started being turned, I mean, he was developing it. But at that moment, I was like, Oh, my God, like, what did I do? Well, they thankfully didn't stay like in that in that dark place for very long and was able to be picked back up by like our friends and family and whatnot.

Scott Benner 1:03:17
Yeah, that just makes me super sad because you were disconnected by distance. Like, I mean, I get that you would feel that way but didn't feel that way and not be able to see him or hold him or talk to him or anything. Like had to add to the despair, I would imagine.

Tara Caudill 1:03:32
Yeah, it was not fun.

Scott Benner 1:03:36
Wow. Oh, you guys, your story's terrific. I appreciate you fighting through the technical stuff. And I actually enjoyed the birds. You're the you're now the third episode with birds in the background. I have to tell you, I find it relaxing. So nice. There they are. I can't wait to tell Jenny about this.

Tara Caudill 1:03:58
Please like message me when you talk to her?

Scott Benner 1:04:00
Yeah, I'm gonna tell her that you named your baby after No. No, do it. That way she'd be so happy if somebody did that. It would break her heart if I told her no. Oh, yeah. Okay, don't but I can't wait to tell her the rest of this. And I genuinely hope that this other Jenny Smith comes on the podcast at some point. Yeah, I really know I want that very badly. All the sudden that's the most important thing in my life. Give them both on at the same time. Well, I seriously so look, this is not a like a flex, it would be a weird flex if it was but I could send an email and find Jenny Smith and get her on the podcast but I don't want to do that. Like I want to see like I want to wait like this go up months from now and like sometime in 2022 Like I just get this email and it's like Hi, I'm Jenny Smith. I'm gonna be like yes, but I feel like like we like one some long game so All right. Well, I will let you go. I'm assuming you have a home to build and and a life to put together there in Texas and I want to wish you a lot of luck. Seriously,

Tara Caudill 1:04:59
I appreciate you taking the time for all this Scott I know that you got a lot going on and I know this is kind of like your gig but I I really do appreciate being able to share share my side of it since Chad got to share his

Scott Benner 1:05:14
Yeah, no I thought it was important I remember back when he was talking thinking that I would want to hear from what it was like to be on the opposite side of that phone call. So yeah, I'm thrilled you did it via Don't thank me. Like, you know, people like you don't come on the there's no podcast, so I really appreciate it. I hope you have a great day.

Tara Caudill 1:05:34
You too, Scott. Thank you.

Scott Benner 1:05:39
A huge thank you to one of today's sponsors, G voc glucagon, find out more about Chivo Kaipa pen at G folk glucagon.com Ford slash juicebox. You spell that? G VOKEGL. You see ag o n.com. Forward slash juicebox. And I'd like to of course, thank Tara for coming on the show and giving us her side of that diagnosis story. Thanks so much for listening. I'll be back soon with another episode of bugling with Scott with his little mouth bugle. That would not be a very good podcast.

If you're enjoying the Juicebox Podcast, please share it with someone who you think might also enjoy it. And don't forget to subscribe and follow in your podcast app. Thanks so much for listening today. I'll be back very soon with another episode of The Juicebox Podcast.

#609 Rocky and Bullwinkle

Lacie is an adult living with type 1 diabetes.

+ Click for EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Scott Benner 0:00
Hello friends, and welcome to episode 609 of the Juicebox Podcast.

On today's episode of The Juicebox Podcast we'll be speaking with Lacie. She is an adult with type one diabetes, who has a very different diagnosis story. Please remember, while you're listening that nothing you hear on the Juicebox Podcast should be considered advice, medical or otherwise, always consult a physician before making any changes to your health care plan are becoming bold with insulin. I'm not going to ruin the episode for you. But Lacey was involved in a trial as a child that identified her as having antibodies for type one diabetes. So she had five years to get ready for her diagnosis. Her story is terrific. She's Canadian, so you know she's super nice. All you got to do now is settle in, get your earphones just right. Get them where you like them. And let the story unfold. If you'd like a simple and easy way to support people with type one diabetes and support the Juicebox Podcast, take the survey AT T one D exchange.org. Forward slash juicebox. It'll take you less than 10 minutes. It's completely HIPAA compliant, absolutely anonymous, and it will actually help people.

This episode of The Juicebox Podcast is sponsored by Omni pod makers of the Omni pod dash, and the Omni pod promise. Learn more at Omni pod.com forward slash juice box. And a little later in the show. I'll tell you all about the dash and the promise. The podcast is also sponsored by Dexcom, makers of the Dexcom G six continuous glucose monitor. You can start today@dexcom.com Ford slash juice box get the CGM that my daughter has been wearing since she was a really little I probably should figure out exactly how long she's had it. But I mean, she was tiny. So maybe 10 years at least probably more. I don't know. I'd have to look. Anyway, that thing's Great. Dexcom comm forward slash juice box.

Lacie 2:23
My name is Lacie. I live in Ontario, Canada, and I have had diabetes for 20 years.

Scott Benner 2:30
You know, see now I see. We just had 20 minutes worth of technical problems that you put up with nicely. I couldn't understand why you're being so kind.

Lacie 2:41
And now you're blaming it on the fact that I'm Canadian. I'm not

Scott Benner 2:43
blaming it. I'm saying a nice thing. Right? I love a country that only stabs each other no shooting. I like that.

Lacie 2:50
Well, I wouldn't be too quick to jump on that. I used to live in Toronto plenty of people got shot Toronto. It's

Scott Benner 2:56
funny when I if I joke like that somebody who's ever been there. And I only say there now because I'm super aware of a person who was on recently who said they live in Toronto. And now I want to say it like T R and T Yeah, oh,

Lacie 3:10
people tend to remove letters from Toronto. I usually say Toronto, but a lot of people say Toronto or Toronto or something like that. It's just Toronto. We're lazy. We're lazy with our syllables.

Scott Benner 3:21
I loved it. I was like Toronto. Damn right. I live in guaranty I don't even know how to take words out of New Jersey or letters out in New Jersey. Okay, so you were how old are you now?

Lacie 3:31
I am 31

Scott Benner 3:33
she diagnosed in year 11 Yes, and you basically lived on the rim of the earth. Just wait. So probably no health care just a walrus took care of you or something like that. How did it go?

Lacie 3:44
Ah, no, actually, I I had quite a robust health care system nearby me. And actually, this was kind of what I wanted to come on here about because my diagnosis story didn't actually start when I was diagnosed it started when my brother was diagnosed.

Scott Benner 4:01
I know I'm excited and thank you for saying about so that was really great. He said about just now and it was so Canadian and now I'm just all warm inside non-reading So

Lacie 4:12
I didn't realize that we set it any differently than I always hear the jokes about people saying a boot but I didn't think it was that

Scott Benner 4:19
like you didn't do you about like you just okay yeah, it's fantastic. I love it it's probably from years and years of running from grizzly bears. I would think it's probably changed your voice boxes because all

Lacie 4:30
the money yeah just for the extra oxygen that needs to get in for running from you know deadly predator so

Scott Benner 4:34
it makes more sense. Yeah, least you don't have snakes. You don't have

Lacie 4:38
nothing that'll kill you now. Yeah,

Scott Benner 4:40
that's how I measure snakes. Some people measure them in meters. I measure them and if you're going to stiffen up and die after they

Lacie 4:48
bite you know our snakes are nice.

Scott Benner 4:51
Canada land of nice snakes. How so your brother has type one as well as he older or younger than you.

Lacie 4:58
He is two years older than me. So he was diagnosed when he was eight, and I was six.

Scott Benner 5:03
Interesting. And how did you just always? Like, did your family just always assume you were going to get type one? Or what do you like your no.

Lacie 5:13
So back, this was pre TrialNet days, but when my brother was diagnosed, my dad is also type one. And when they saw, okay, father's type one, first child is type one. There was a study going on in England and my brother's endocrinologist really wanted to send my blood as part of that study. So they hooked me up to an IV for I think most of the day, they were drawing intravenous blood samples every two hours, I had to have a shunt in my arm for pretty much most of the day. And they did all these tests and sent it off to England, and it came back and they're like, Yeah, give her five years. She'll have it.

Scott Benner 5:58
British. Seriously, they're always yeller.

Lacie 6:04
Yeah, I I've tried to find what the study was. I can't find it. But I also might just not be very good at googling.

Scott Benner 6:12
Yeah, though, so 20 years ago. I mean, it's sort of a no brainer, right? Your dad has it, your brother has it, they're like, if we're gonna find out if this thing works or not, we'll definitely take Lacey's blood. And I'm assuming like, if you had a pet Beaver, it would also have type one diabetes sounds like everyone in the house did.

Lacie 6:28
My dad, my uncle, my brother, and I all have type one. Wow,

Scott Benner 6:33
hey, is your mother. Does your mother have any autoimmune issues?

Lacie 6:38
Her autoimmune issues didn't show up until she was well into like her 40s and 50s. And she ended up with hypothyroidism. Which I also have. And my dad also has

Scott Benner 6:50
I'm starting to think that people with autoimmune issues put out a signal that other people with autoimmune issues pick up and we don't realize that but we're like, like little beacons, maybe. Wow, that's, um, look at you. That's crazy. So your uncle, your brother, your father yourself? Yes. All have type one eat 20 years ago, before anything like trial that exists. A doctor says, Hey, I think if we get your kids but how? Why did they have to take it the way they did?

Lacie 7:17
I have no idea. To be honest. I just remember being hooked up to this machine. I couldn't move around. And they kept bringing med students in to talk to us and asking these med students all these questions. And I remember my brother to smartass that he is sorry, cursing, sorry. answering all the questions before the med students could

Scott Benner 7:40
see understood type one better than they did?

Lacie 7:42
Well, yeah. And at that point, they were asking questions about you know, our history, like our medical history, our family history, stuff like that. So he was just spouting off all the answers before they could get it out.

Scott Benner 7:53
It's interesting that as time passes and technology, even medical technology gets better and better. Like it sounds like they were basically like they tapped. Like they wanted to get the blood right from your heart or something like that. Like it was just like, and now they just take this little it's

Lacie 8:08
just a finger poke. I remember when I was a kid going to diabetes clinic when they switched over from an IV blood draw to get your a one C to A finger poke to get your a one C and how excited I was.

Scott Benner 8:19
Bet you were that you were I know Arden gets the when she does the agency in the office. They do like it's a pretty heavy poke like they do your thumb usually because it's juicy here. And and it's a pretty big drop of blood compared to like what her contour meter uses. And she's always like, wow, like even that seems like vicious to her. I would imagine having an IV put in just to get your agency done, like how much blood did they need back then to do your agency a lot, I guess.

Lacie 8:47
Oh, they took full vials, I remember, I went to it was called the pediatric medical day unit in, in London, Ontario, call out to the London Health Sciences Center. Because those guys are amazing. They'd bring you in for your appointment and they would take you in do your blood draws and do your pee in a cup stuff. And then you wait right there while they did all the laboratory and then you'd go in to talk to the doctor. So you didn't have to go for multiple appointments to get, you know, the chemistry done or anything like that. And it was it was actually pretty, pretty. A lot of blood. I remember at the beginning it was a lot of blood. And then slowly it became less about the blood and more about peeing in a cup. And then they they, when they did the a one CS they had to almost like it wasn't a drop of blood on a thing they had to like, gouge your finger like they kept running this plastic thing over your finger and like milking it for blood to get a bunch out into this little thing but they still just poked your finger so it was better than an IV drop but not by much.

Scott Benner 9:50
My wife just bought these kits on Amazon to figure out what your blood type was. She thought it would be fun. She's a very sciency person. So she saw it online. She's like, Look how interesting they are. And she bought a bunch and all The rest of us were like, We don't care what blood type. And it was a similar thing like you needed, like a fair amount of blood, but it was from a finger stick. And we're all just sitting around this weightless round table by our sofa. Like we're all just kind of around the table bleeding everywhere. Just ridiculous.

Lacie 10:17
Yeah, that was pretty much what it was like it at clinic. And

Scott Benner 10:21
now I forgot what my blood type was. So that was definitely should have written it down. So how old are you when this happens? They draw that blood and tell you you're definitely I was six. And you didn't get it until you were

Lacie 10:33

They said five years and it was five years almost on the diet. Wow.

Scott Benner 10:39
Okay. Did you live every day thinking you were gonna get type one diabetes? Or do you were there? Absolutely. Really?

Lacie 10:46
Oh, yeah. I was convinced anytime I got sick. Like if I had to go home from school because I wasn't feeling well. I would tell all my friends like, oh, yeah, I'm probably gonna come back with needles.

Scott Benner 10:57
I gotta go. I gotta pick some diabetes up at the hospital. Yeah, pretty much. Wow. So impactfully negative positive?

Lacie 11:10
Ah, hard to say. I mean, because I was so like, I guess you could say prepared, like, I knew this was gonna happen. I had already kind of gone through whatever grief stages I needed to go through before even getting my diagnosis. So when it came time for me to, you know, get my diagnosis and going into the hospital. We already had all the answers. So we just kind of give us the prescription for the insulin and send us home like we didn't really need or shouldn't say need. We didn't really want to stay for any of the additional lessons or stuff because I mean, my parents had already been through that with my brother. I had already kind of gone through it just from watching my dad and my brother with all their stuff. I remember, on the day I got diagnosed we actually had the fight with the ER doctor just kept repeating like call this doctor who was my brother's endocrinologist at the time, called the doctor. Tell him Lacey's diabetic, he'll come down and the doctor was like, There's no way you could know that this just you guys are just, you know, overreacting. It's fine. It's like, call the doctor.

Scott Benner 12:24
They'll come years ago, we send some blood to jolly old England. And I'm telling you right now I have type one diabetes. Let's get this thing going. What was your symptom? Did you catch it super early,

Lacie 12:34
super early. So I never actually had the extreme thirst and frequent urination and all that that you hear about with a lot of people. My family just made it a routine to test my blood sugar whenever I acted differently than normal. So if I was sick, I got a finger poke. If I had some sort of outburst, I got a finger poke. We were at my grandmother's house, and we were playing a board game. And apparently, I jumped across the table and tried to strangle my brother. So after that, my grandmother was like, Well, time to stick your finger and I think I was 17 at the time, which is what to you guys. 17

Scott Benner 13:19
Do you want to bring up the

Lacie 13:20
300 I've got the little conversion chart on my desktop right now.

Scott Benner 13:25
So have the conversion chart that's available at Juicebox Podcast comm

Lacie 13:29
i i Do I have the conversion chart available at juicebox podcast.com/conversion.

Scott Benner 13:33
Lazy job. Very good job. That was excellent. Are you tapping something on the table or fidgeting with your hands?

Lacie 13:43
I'm sorry, I was probably rocking in my chair.

Scott Benner 13:45
Okay, stop doing that. No, I'm just kidding. Just please. A light right now people listening to like, how did he know that there's this light tapping in my ear. And it's making me mental or mental or so tell me again. You were what you're

Lacie 14:02
eight. I was 11 at this time, and I was 17 in millimoles, which is 306 According to

Scott Benner 14:09
and a little surly, apparently.

Lacie 14:11
And I was grumpy. I was very cranky. And so they got that test and my grandmother called my dad and he asked if I had any other symptoms my grandmother's like, no, he's like, Okay, well, when I get off work, we'll go to the ER. We went to the ER but because I was still honeymooning at that point, by the time we got to the ER my blood sugar was back in normal range, I would imagine. Yeah. Which is where the the argument with the ER doctor because there's none of my tests

Scott Benner 14:42
perfect blood sugar, and they're just like, you don't know what you're out of your mind. People are crazy. That's probably Yeah. Yeah. What was your father when he was diagnosed?

Lacie 14:51
He This is an interesting story. So he was 16 when he was diagnosed with diabetes, however, because he was at the time I'm working as someone with a professional driving license, they diagnosed him as type two, because back then if you were diabetic with type one, you could not be a commercial driver of any sort, they would pull your license. So they diagnosed him as type two and put them on Metformin. And obviously, that didn't work like at all. But he stayed with that until he was in his 30s when my brother was diagnosed and one of the nurses that the hospital that was one of my brother's nurses was like, You're being dumb. They won't pull your license anymore. Just switch it get on insulin because you need this

Scott Benner 15:44
16 What was he like flying the Canadian, like space shuttle or what was he? What are you doing? You're 16 that you need a driver's license for?

Lacie 15:52
He was driving a truck like flower trucks, Flower delivery trucks.

Scott Benner 15:56
Cool thought is running guns for the mob or something like they just have French accents, right?

Lacie 16:03
I mean, kind of there's a lot of Hells Angels in Quebec.

Scott Benner 16:08
Well, that could be a great title for this episode. There's a lot of Hells Angels in Quebec. I might go with that. A little long, but damn it, if it fits, it fits. So my whole reasoning for asking was your grandmother didn't have any. Like, reference points. She didn't raise the type one.

Lacie 16:29
Not so much. I mean, at that point, she'd been around my my dad and my uncle long enough that she was kind of used to that. And also she was borderline type two. So she had a meter at her house that that's what she used to test me.

Scott Benner 16:46
Do you find yourself wondering when Metformin was made originally? Because the way you said it? Oh, it's introduced the ability of metformin to counter insulin resistance and address adult onset hyper glycaemia. Without weight gain or increased risk of hypoglycemia gradually gathered credence in Europe. And they after intense scrutiny, Metformin was introduced in the US in 95. This is interesting. You look at this 60 years of metformin use at

Lacie 17:20
a glance. So did I wonder what they gave him when he was first diagnosed? Oh, it

Scott Benner 17:24
sounds like it's been around for a long time. It's this, I have an article here. I have an article here. Put the date at the top of people learn to use the internet. Anyway, this, this article is titled 60 years of metformin use. So I don't know when it was written. Because some people don't know how to set up their websites. But

Lacie 17:51
well, my dad's not 60 yet. So then yeah, he probably would have been put on that

Scott Benner 17:55
would have been inside of that timeframe. Yeah, yeah. European Association for the Study of diabetes. put a date on your articles, please. So that's kind of amazing. I definitely didn't know that. I had no idea Metformin had been around that long.

Lacie 18:13
I knew it was an old drug I just didn't realize it was battle gets used

Scott Benner 18:16
for so many different things nowadays to there are people using it in aging studies.

Lacie 18:23
Yeah, I've heard about this, that they're trying to use it off label for quite a lot of things. And I don't know they tried to give it to me at one point and my family history of metformin having very bad reactions where we get really bad Bernie muscles like almost anyone in my family who'd ever taken Metformin has had terrible muscle burn. So I did not want to try

Scott Benner 18:45
not looking for that. I've seen it used off label for weight loss. There's this right here from the NIH Metformin is also allow Metformin also retards aging in model organisms and reduces the incidence of aging related diseases such as neurodegenerative disease, cancer in humans. The despite its widespread use the mechanisms by which Metformin exerts favorable effects on aging remain largely unknown. That's interesting. That's very from the NIH. That's the government. They wouldn't lie to us. No, not at all. I don't see why they would. Do you have a government? It's not

Lacie 19:29
we do. Yes. Yeah. Although not as crazy as yours. But yes,

Scott Benner 19:32
we do have a government that boys way too pretty to be in charge of things. I think there's a lot of people that agree with you. You must get like I would get distracted. I'd walk past I'd walk past midnight like I am so damn handsome and I would just stand there for a couple of minutes. I recorded something for the people on the Facebook page, and I put like a camera in front of me. And in the camera frame. I looked great. I thought it was good. I looked good in the mirror. I got the film back late like you know that The film listened to me. I took it to the photo mat, I moved the card from one place to the computer. And I opened it up and I was horrified when I saw myself.

Lacie 20:08
Oh, cameras are not kind, especially the digital ones now like webcams are they make you look like you're demonic. It's horrible.

Scott Benner 20:17
I felt like I looked better, but or definitely didn't anyway, I don't get to run Canada. For one of them. I'm not I'm not handsome enough into I guess I'm not Canadian, which would probably really slow the process down. Okay, so I really want to as best you can tell me because you were young when it happened? Do you think it had a negative impact on your psyche? Or Or no, do you think it was kind of nice to to know it was coming like I want to understand that piece of it.

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Lacie 24:54
I think possibly long term, it led to a bit more Burn out than if I had just been kind of dropped in the middle of it. Short term, I didn't get the sudden, like, life changing news kind of thing. I didn't get the trauma from that. But because I already knew so much. And like, the first time I held a needle was the first time I gave myself an injection, there was no practice shots. They walked in with the doll as I was giving my injection for lunch, like the doll that they wanted me to practice on. I was like, No, I got this. So there was a bit of there was a bit of a perfectionist expectation, I guess I would say, where it's, oh, she's great. She's got this. And so I don't think I really was given very much assistance or support, because it was assumed that I had a handle on it.

Scott Benner 25:52
That's interesting. That's sort of like when you're a great student, and then you get into a class you don't know, but nobody wants to help you. Because like, Lacey always does great with this stuff. Like you just people yeah, get get to the point where they feel like, Oh, this is just this works. We don't have to pay attention to any more. She understands.

Lacie 26:08
Yeah, and then add on to that the fact that they also had my brother with type one. And because he was more of a traditional diagnosis story of, you know, got really skinny, you had a long history of symptoms before they finally got him diagnosed. He kind of got this label as being a problem child with behavior issues when he was young. But it was because of his blood sugars. Like he was eight years old and getting into fights because his blood sugar was probably running it 300 400 All the time, right?

Scott Benner 26:41
I mean, and as we see from you when you tried to make him eat a sorry, piece. Like I'm not sorry, it just, is that how it went? Let me let me just imagine, I in my mind, you have the yellow and the green piece. you've launched yourself across the coffee table. Your grandmother is yelling, like, what's this all about? And then you're and you're, you're like, I'm not sorry? He deserves it. Like, do you guys get the irony? These are the sorry, nevermind. Like you're making total sense, but I feel like a lunatic. Wow, that sucks. I guess. I don't know. I mean, I can't. I guess it's that like old game you play when you're a kid, when you're like, you know, if I can tell you the exact day and time you were gonna die? Would you want to know?

Lacie 27:25
Yeah, it's kind of like that, right? Like, if it's gonna cause you to just worry about it all the time, then probably not. But if you can prepare for it, then that's better. But at the same time, because I had all the time to prepare, there was an assumption that I didn't need as much support. So like, I was 11. I, I handled my diabetes, for the most part, at least, I probably had a bit of help until I would say, going into high school in grade nine. So I think I would have been 13 or 14. At that point, it was completely me. I didn't have parents telling me how much insulin to take. I didn't have, you know, any sort of assistance with trying to figure things out. And I mean, at that point, when I first was diagnosed, I was taking three units of NPH total. That was it in a day. Slowly that developed into three shots, one of mph and regular mixed, one of just regular and one of just NPH. And that was so that I didn't have to take any needles while I was at school. And then in high school, here's your human log. Here's your Lantis. Take what you need. And that was kind of it. How was

Scott Benner 28:42
the translation from regular an MPH to a faster acting meal insulin because there's a lot more to do there. They left that. Yeah, well, you know, let me go back for a second. Sometimes little girls come off very mature. Like, do you mean like, they're almost like little moms walking around and stuff like that at times? Like, did you have that vibe? Did you just were your parents just like Lacey can handle it? Or

Lacie 29:06
oh, 100% Okay. 100% I was between, you know, in my family, I was the logical, you know, responsible one. Like, I used to get teased gently by my family because we'd be watching a movie and there'd be a sad scene. Everyone in the room is crying except me. Because I'm just like, no this logically, yes, this would happen. That would happen. That makes sense. It's just like, you don't have a soul. But that kind of got applied to my diabetes as well, where it's just like, Okay, well, you're you'll get it like the doctors tell you what to take and you'll get it. And I had this weird I had this weird dichotomy in my parents. My parents divorced when I was eight. So before my diagnosis, and my mom was very much eight If you do what the doctors tell you, you'll be fine. They're very smart. They've got it figured out, just do what they tell you. And my dad, and actually, most of my dad's side of the family believe that if you go to a doctor and don't already know what the problem is and how to fix it, you're going to get screwed. So, combining those two, what I got was doctors are very smart. They're the most intelligent people. They don't have this figured out. Therefore, no one has it figured out. Therefore, it doesn't matter.

Scott Benner 30:30
Though, I thought you were gonna say that you decided that doctors are gonna just screw me really, in a way because they're super smart, but they're gonna screw me over. So you just felt like no one had an answer.

Lacie 30:44
I felt like no one had an answer. And I mean, back then CGM weren't really a thing. Pumps, I remember going to a couple meetings about possibly getting a pump. And then them telling me I would have to test my blood sugar more because of the pump. And that seemed to dissuade me. So I was never really put on a pumper anything like that when I was a kid. So yeah, I just got into this headspace of, there are no answers. No one has this figured out. Just do the best you can. But don't really stress about it, because why stress about something that no one has an answer to anyways.

Scott Benner 31:22
So does that make it feel like your life is more finite? Didn't actually I probably should have put it did. Like, there's where my common sense would have really come into play. But I want to stop on it for a second. Because I think it's interesting back then, with with the technology that existed, the insulin that existed, it really was more of a management situation. And by management, I mean, like, let's just keep this as you know, with as much at least volatility as possible, I guess the end, we'll see how long we can keep these people alive. They'll put some insulin in the morning, like they didn't know faster insulin was gonna come. They didn't know that, you know, like, there was a moment in time. Like, really, I say it every time somebody brings it up, but you would just shoot some insulin in the morning, eat on schedule, and then shoot some insulin at dinner. Right? Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. And so that was just like, you're putting this baseline of nebulous insulin in you that's going to maybe if you're lucky, holds your blood sugar down, but nobody's testing anyway. So you wouldn't really know if you were using enough or not, or if you were having foods that were so high glycaemic, you know, index, load, etc, that it wouldn't have mattered if the sun wasn't in there with enough power, like there was no nuance to it whatsoever. Now, this whole

Lacie 32:41
idea of like sugar surfing or meeting, you know, the need with the insulin, like there was none of that because you didn't have the data that you needed. And I'm a very data driven person. So for me, like testing three times a day, which was the recommendation at that point. Not even every time you ate, or every time you took insulin just three times a day.

Scott Benner 33:02
Not enough,

Lacie 33:03
it's not enough. So I was looking at it going, I can't use this. What is this? Like, you want me to try and figure out what needs to change or what needs to happen, but I don't have enough information to make that call. And even the doctors like when I'd go in. And they'd look at things, then they're just like, well, I don't know, we'll try doing this and see what three months. But I was a kid like I was I was changing so fast that that wasn't enough. So I got to a point where, because the data that I was getting from the testing three times a day wasn't enough, and it wasn't really doing any good. I just stopped testing.

Scott Benner 33:43
Yeah, because what was the point? Right, what were you getting out of the number? Yeah,

Lacie 33:46
why would I cause myself pain when I'm not really getting any useful information out of this, I'll just go by how I feel if I feel crappy. I'll take a little bit more. If I, you know, thinks I need a bit more clarity on what my number is. I'll test but like, I think I had strips going expired. Because of how infrequently I was tested. I

Scott Benner 34:07
wouldn't bother. Yeah, I have to say, that makes sense to me. It really does. I mean, I don't know how often I would do something like that if the information coming back wasn't helping. So you said you got human log in your teens?

Lacie 34:22
Yeah, I think it was 13 or 14 When I went to high school. So essentially, my elementary school didn't want me bringing needles to school, and didn't want me know when at the school was well, not that I needed them to inject me because I could inject myself but no one really wanted to take responsibility for that. So we did the nNr while I was in elementary school, because it allowed us to do one in the morning before I went to school, and then the other two when I got home later on in the day, but for high school, it was less of an issue. There's a lot more autonomy, and my high school didn't have a problem with me bringing the needles to school because it was probably an easier way for them. Manage, they didn't have to do anything about it so they didn't really care. And I was already on an IEP which is a guest kind of like your guys's legal documents for our 401k or whatever it is Wait that's a retirement plans.

Scott Benner 35:20
Why do I say that? podcast a 504 plan off the top my head, I'm in trouble. No, I get that vibe because that's one of the ways I got this. The the school to just leave us alone was I said like, look, you know, if she's texting me, you're out of this, like you haven't made any of these decisions. And they're staring at me. And I was like to be more candid. Let me be blunt. If she drops dead, it's my fault, not your fault. And they were like, Oh, that we like and then they, they just like yeah, sure. texter. Like get us out of this. You could see how excited they were to be out of the process.

Lacie 36:08
Yeah, you know, in elementary school that worked out as you know, just take the needles outside of school hours. And then when I got to high school, it was a combination of the school was okay with me bringing needles to school. I already had an individualized education plan for other things. So adding this to it wasn't that big a deal. And also, there was a cafeteria at school. So it gave me more flexibility to be able to like because I started getting lunch at the cafeteria. I love my mom. She hates cooking. So when she had she had the ability to just give me money and stop making lunches. She was like, great. Here's 20 bucks. There's your lunch for the week.

Scott Benner 36:50
I can't accept it enough. I that making lunches, doing homework? Like when that stuff stops you like Oh, thank god like it was yes, it feels like so much. I don't know why I just hated that part of being a parent.

Lacie 37:04
Yeah, it's so she's like, there's a cafeteria. Great. Here's 20 bucks lunch costs about I think it was at that time, a fries of burger of some kind and a drink were $3. So she's like, you can spend $3 a day on lunch? And you've got $5 Extra if you want to get treats. All right,

Scott Benner 37:22
cool. You me out of this? Yeah, pretty much the same thing is the school with the care. They're like, listen, let me just, I want to step away quietly. So. So when this when this occurs, this changeover occurs and you're older, and now you're shooting at meal times. Is that a big change? Like, in the way you think about diabetes?

Lacie 37:45
No, because it was still with the just testing, you know, a few times a day. So to me, it was just changing from three times to four times it didn't really feel any? Well, I guess five times if you include the night time one, it didn't really feel any different to me. Okay, so I still wasn't really thinking of it as this can give you more control. Because there wasn't the data for the control. It was just this, this is the new regimen, you know, you do at mealtimes. And then whenever you eat something, take this much. It took forever for us to even get like carb counting or a sliding scale in place. It was just kind of a very static. This is how much you take it each meal kind of thing. Okay,

Scott Benner 38:29
so regimens the exact right word, right? It's just yeah, do this, then do that. Do this and do that. Now we're going to do that a little more frequently. And what was the outcome? What were your outcomes? Like? Like, were you having a one seat? Like, do you know?

Lacie 38:44
Oh, not great, not great. I remember when I was diagnosed, my a one C wasn't diabetic yet, because they caught it so early. It was like 5.2 or something like that. And then it slowly increased while I was in the pediatric endocrinology. I think my taco was 10 by the time I exited into the adult system, because there was just it was just my body slowly given up the ghost, like it was just my pancreas slowly, deteriorating until the point where there was no insulin helping out anymore from my body. And the control just was not there.

Scott Benner 39:26
Yeah. 10 anyone sees equivalent of like, 240 average blood sugar.

Lacie 39:31
Oh, yeah. And it was swinging. I was swinging wildly.

Scott Benner 39:35
So you think you were even higher? You were in the three and four hundreds of times? Oh, probably. Yeah. I don't doubt that. But you probably didn't get low very frequently. Like dizzy, I guess dizzy?

Lacie 39:45
No, I didn't get low very frequently. Although I may have but I developed pretty severe hypoglycemia unawareness. That was in. I found out about that later on when I was in college. But yeah, it was. It just kind of slowly devolved. Like there was no real. There was no control. At that point. It was just like you said management, maybe management of symptoms, but not really control

Scott Benner 40:17
that unawareness thing. We never really dig into that for some reason, it may be you know, because it happened to you. Does that mean your blood sugar's super low, and everything else about you is fine, or your blood sugar's super low, and you're just not having symptoms, but to an outsider, you look altered.

Lacie 40:35
Um, for me, it was a combination of not having the capacity to notice the symptoms, so that someone from the outside might notice, but because my brain has already been shut off by the low blood sugar, I couldn't notice.

Scott Benner 40:52
Okay, so you were functioning but not functioning well, but unaware of it.

Lacie 40:57
Yeah. And I think that there was a combination of that with also just a minimization of symptoms, like my body didn't respond as dramatically. Because there was some time there was actually one time when I was in college, I was on a bus coming back from work, and I thought it was high. I was like, Man, my stomach's really upset. Like, I bet you any money that I'm high, I should probably take a correction. This is at the point that I'm starting to gain control over my sugar's again. Like I should probably take a correction. And I was seconds away from just taking a couple of units, like not even checking my sugar. And I was like, You know what, no, I'll test because I feel really bad. And if it's too high, then I'll know I need to take more. I tested and I was 1.6. Which is 29. Oh, wow. Yeah. And I was ready to take more insulin because I thought I was I was high. There was no way that I was low. So at that, that was actually the the incident that made me decide to go Dexcom goes that that happened? Maybe seven years ago. Wow. Yeah.

Scott Benner 42:11
So 13 years into diabetes. And you were still like, I have this. I hope Arden hears this one one day. I hope Arden hears them all one day. I don't know if y'all realize this or not. But this podcast is just a time capsule for my kid. I'm glad you guys. Oh, absolutely. And I hope she hears this one one day, because when she was little she be like, I don't need to test I feel fine. And I would always I always say the same thing. I'm like, Listen to how you felt was important. There wouldn't be any meters or glucose monitors or anything. You just do stuff when you felt a certain way. I was like, that's not how this goes. But that's fascinating. Like you just had a symptom. You assumed it was a high symptom book. I'm glad you're tested. Yeah, me too. I mean, growing luckily,

Lacie 42:56
luckily, the bus had just stopped at a stop outside of McDonald's. So I ran in and scarf down as much food as

Scott Benner 43:03
major blood sugar 500. Yeah, pretty much. I think back to driving with my friend, Mike, when we were younger. And it was always known that whoever was in the front seat while Mike was driving, you had to sort of be driving as well. Like you were just

Lacie 43:19
paying attention to Mike's symptoms. Well,

Scott Benner 43:22
we always just, you know, it's funny, we knew so little about it. And he wasn't, I don't think he knew very much about it. But it was just the idea that sometimes like you know, you'd make a right turn and you wouldn't get all the way into the lane. He just would reach over sometimes it just nudge the wheel a little bit. You'd be like, Oh, wow. But it wasn't constantly sometimes he was fine. And sometimes he had, you know, but he would get surly. And I look back now and I realized that his blood sugar was high. And that people just thought he was like jerk I didn't even personally personality, but he didn't is such a lovely person. And but that's really that's really something else at the time you got the human log did meters get more portable, at that point to

Lacie 44:06
the meters were decently portable. They all came in a little like nylon cases or whatever. So I could fit one of those. Like, I could fit my meter in my back pocket, and I could fit my syringe and my bottle of human walk in my front pocket. And that was just kind of how things went.

Scott Benner 44:22
Yeah. Yeah. Mike had this little like, pouch and everything was just in it. He didn't carry a meter though. Interesting. Wow. Okay, so seven years ago, you almost Bolus when you're incredibly low. You realize I gotta pay better attention to this. And you find seven years ago is is pretty close to the beginning of Dexcom. So it's not like they existed for long and you were ignoring them, right? No, so

Lacie 44:47
that was oh, maybe it wasn't seven years ago. Maybe it was more recently than that. It was when I was in college, which would have been 20 1220 13 Yeah, so like, seven, eight years ago, so yeah, I guess there's that. Um, but yeah, at that point, I was actually starting, I had already started to kind of be like, Okay, this, this isn't good. Like I need to, I need to sort myself out. I think after high school, I pretty much stopped going to endocrinologists and stopped getting my UNC checks and stop testing and stop doing everything still took my insulin that was about it. stopped doing any of that until I got to college. And specifically until I moved in with my now husband, who was like, wait, don't you have to go to a doctor about this? And I'm like, Yeah, but I don't have one here. And I don't know where one is. Then he just kind of one day was out driving and texts me. And he's like, there's literally an endocrinologist office, three blocks from our place, like, call them.

Scott Benner 45:51
Well, that's loving Good for him. He's like, I like this girl. I don't need to start over again with another one. So yeah, let's keep you good. And so this is your first how long ago was this? Now when you this? When you say this? Is this seven years range?

Lacie 46:07
Yeah, it's about eight, a little bit before this incident happened. It was about eight years. So I went into this new endocrinologist office. Turned out it was a great clinic. There's LMC actually, I think you had someone earlier who was from Ontario who went to LMC. They're fantastic. And I, what's gotten with them? What was our

Scott Benner 46:28
first step of like, making the shift? Like you come in from this experience that we've been talking about for, you know, 45 minutes now. And now suddenly, you're going to be you know, quote, unquote, take better care of yourself. How does that start?

Lacie 46:41
It starts with a very good CDE. Because I originally was like, just give me my a one sees, I'll handle it. Like, I was convinced that no one had any answers for me. So there was no point in really having the discussions. And when I started talking to her, I realized, oh, you know, some stuff. This is good. Tell me everything, you know.

Scott Benner 47:05
So it's a reeducation. Really. Yeah. And it was

Lacie 47:09
finally finally finding like the information that I had been just convinced didn't exist.

Scott Benner 47:15
And willing, I was gonna say to hear it, not just say, Oh, no one knows. Because I see people get lulled into that after long periods of diabetes, especially people diagnosed right around your time, right in in the past. You just had this experience for so long, not only do you believe no one knows, this is what you think it is. And even when someone comes along and says, Hey, you know what, not for nothing. But if you just turn this dial on, do this here, and why don't you try Pre-Bolus thing? This, this would be a six a one see you It's hard to believe, right?

Lacie 47:47
Oh, yeah. And as soon as I started talking with her, I was just like, you know, this, you know, what's going on? She didn't have diabetes, but she she understood enough of it that she could talk about it intelligently. It wasn't a we'll just do this, everything will be fine. It was no like this is this is hard. This is constant, you have to be paying attention. And I understand how much brainpower that takes and how much energy that takes. So let's try and make this as easy as possible. And as low in energy as possible, so that you're actually able to, to follow through,

Scott Benner 48:24
through remember how that was accomplished. Like how did they How did she make it easy?

Lacie 48:29
First step was, she gave me a physician's Dexcom so one of the ones that I could see the results, but I had to get it back at the end of the 10 days, or whatever it

Scott Benner 48:39
was. Yeah. Yeah.

Lacie 48:42
So she gave me pens, she's like, you're gonna stop using syringes you look at the drug dealer, here's some pens so that you're actually you know, don't look scary to people when you have to take an injection let's get you a good tester let's get you let's get this Dexcom on us so that we can check your levels and make sure your your stuffs correct let's you know, get your carb ratios dialed in. It was kind of a slow process. They pretty much took what I had been doing previous previously which was the same regimen I'd been using since I was a teenager at that point. And just started from there and then just dial that in.

Scott Benner 49:21
Yeah, how far away from where you ended was what you were doing. Like were your Basal is that much different where your ID

Lacie 49:29
Oh, my Basal is didn't change a lot they adjusted slightly. I was taking way too much mealtime insulin though, like twice as much mealtime insulin as I needed.

Scott Benner 49:38
So were you just getting level a lot. I was driving myself

Lacie 49:41
into the ground because I couldn't feel it. I didn't know.

Scott Benner 49:46
How freaky was it to see the Dexcom data the first time.

Lacie 49:50
It was strange. It was so strange. I was for one I didn't realize I spiked that high after eating because it had always come down but it next Time I tested and then I didn't realize that I was going low that frequently.

Scott Benner 50:06
Yeah. It's so interesting to hear you say that because that's right about the time, I figured all that out for Arden and saw those first CGM graphs. And I was like, wait a minute, you know, the way I tell the story is that I used to put art into bed at 180. And she'd wake up at 90. And I thought I was a genius. But she would go from 180 to like 50. And then she'd sit at 50 for hours. And then I guess her liver would probably kick in, and then drift her back up while she was sleeping to 90. And I would I would just test her before she went to bed. 180 That's her setting for going to bed. You know, you make her highs so she can get through the night. And then look, she's 90 in the morning. It's perfect. She had to be 180 because she finished perfectly at 90. I never realized how low she got or everything else that was going on. And once you see it represented visually, you're like, oh my god, this is all wrong. I'm doing everything wrong.

Lacie 51:03
Yeah, yeah. So we got all that sorted out. And then the next step was getting me on a pump. Luckily, in Canada, well, at least in Ontario, I'm not sure if this is Canada wide or not. We have a it's called the assistive devices program, which pays for the pump, upfront costs 100%, and also gives you a grant every quarter to help cover the cost of this plies. So they got me hooked up with that they got me at the time it was the Animus ping got me on the pump. We talked about getting me on Dexcom. But at that point, nothing covered Dexcom. Like it wasn't the insurance companies didn't cover it, there was no government program to help with it. And I just couldn't afford it as a college kid. So they at least got me the pump. And with that came the ability to make those micro adjustments where I was like, okay, I can make these adjustments, but I need the data to make the adjustments. Therefore, I'm going to test 15 times a day now. And that's what I did. I just upped my testing to you know, as soon as I got up, you know, when I ate after I ate literally every second, I was trying to test my blood sugar to see where I was at. Because I actually had the control with the pump that I could make the adjustments if I had data, right. So it went from I don't want to test my sugar. So I don't want to pump too. Oh, this is what the pump can do. Okay, I'll test my sugar.

Scott Benner 52:33
See, do you listen to the podcast? I do. Yeah. Okay. So when I'm doing the ads for Omnipod and Dexcom. Specifically, do you just sit there and think? Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right.

Lacie 52:43
Um, so the only thing that you have an ad for that I don't already have is the Omni pod because I'm now on the tandem. Right. And the G voc because I don't think it's available in Canada.

Scott Benner 52:56
Thank you. And I hope the advertisers are listening. But that's not what I'm like, I just you know what? We're done. Now. I didn't realize you didn't have it. No, no, I know, I just meant, like when I'm talking about the benefits of pumping, and I'm talking about the benefits of seeing your data, like that 100% of stuff saved your life changed. Yeah. Functionally changed how you live?

Lacie 53:18
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

Scott Benner 53:20
Which, you know, can I ask?

Lacie 53:22
Last test was 6.0. Okay, two,

Scott Benner 53:26
very well done. That's excellent. I believe that's different than 13. Oh, yeah.

Lacie 53:31
That's, that is quite a different level. And I didn't realize how much better I feel with the lower agencies. So when I got to LMC. They tested my agency and it was nine. Just from like, the education that they gave me. We got it down to eight. With the pump. We got it down to mid sevens with the CGM, which I got. Four years ago. I got the Dexcom G six when as soon as it came to Canada, that's what I got. I got that down to mid sixes. And then your podcast got me down to six.

Scott Benner 54:11
Nice. Oh, that is excellent. You I am excited for you. You must be thrilled. I love that you talked about feeling differently. Arden went swimming with friends the other night. So she was away from the CGM for a while she got a little low. She was like 63 ish when they got out of the pool. And I texted her and I was like, hey, you know your blood sugar's low or she doesn't matter. We're coming home. I was making pizzas. I can make pizzas from scratch. It's not a big deal. I was making pizza for her and her friends. They were going to come back from this friend's house, etc. And so Arden's like doesn't matter. We're on our way home, perfect. Like in her mind, she's like 63 Pizza Pre-Bolus This is perfect. And you know, like so she rolls into the house, but I didn't realize they were further away than I thought they were so by the time she got home She was like 55. And so again, whatever she starts eating the food, and we just get the Bolus in wrong. I don't know another way to put it, there was a lot going on and we just kind of botched the Bolus. And our blood sugar ended up in like the 200 range. And it took us a couple hours to fix it. And by the time she went to bed, Dad, my legs hurt. My legs hurt so bad where you come from my legs, rub my knees from my ankles, and she's like, I don't understand why my legs hurt so much. I was like, it's from the higher blood sugar. I know. You went to 200 It's 200. I know it's just 200 it doesn't seem like a big deal. But your body's so accustomed to being in a real like I can pull Arden's blood sugar up right now. It's like I'm doing an ad Hold on a second Arden's blood sugar 78. And if I go back 12 hours, the highest it's been. Let me take a look here. The highest Arden's blood sugar has been in the last 12 hours is 135. And it was basically between 120 Yeah, we had kind of a time, where overnight where it took us a while to get from 120 back down to under 100. Again, maybe three or four hours. And I don't honestly don't know what that was because she and I were watching the movie last night together. And she was like 77. And I was like, this is perfect for going to bed. Which is so weird compared to before. And I was like if we just make her 180 then. But then, as the movie ended, she started to drift up a little bit, but 107 I thought I had it. And then I didn't. Yeah, but since my gosh, since it's it's almost 11 Now since 5am Arden's blood sugar has been between 178 Yeah. So that's what she's accustomed to. Oh, yeah.

Lacie 56:48
And as soon as you go outside of that, like you feel it. And that's the one thing that I've noticed is that now that I'm used to blood sugar's that are stable and a lot lower than they used to be when I do spike up to 15, which is 270 for you guys. Like I feel terrible,

Scott Benner 57:07
right? Like, really, I'm, like, difficult to function. Terrible.

Lacie 57:11
Yeah. And just, I'm nauseous and I don't feel good, and I can't think properly. And it's just I get angry. That is one thing that has not gone away. My high blood sugars put me into a blind rage sometimes. And it's just I'm not, I am not in a good place.

Scott Benner 57:29
Well, well, I if you ever listened to Jenny on like the Pro Tip series and stuff like that, you can tell by listening to her. She's a careful, like, eater, a healthy eater. And I think part of that is because she does not like how she feels when her blood sugar gets higher. Yeah, you know, it's just, it's just is what it is, you know, it's I mean, you have diabetes, you're gonna have to make some, you have to pay attention to some things, or you're going to have this other stuff. And I just don't want people to get in a situation where my legs hurt is a normal part of my life.

Lacie 58:02
You know? Yeah. And I mean, eventually your legs stop hurting, which is crazy. Yeah, well,

Scott Benner 58:06
then you're kind of really in trouble. Because yeah, then your body's making allowances that are internal that are going to lead to other issues. Do you think about that ever? Like, like your father, you said is still alive? How's his health?

Lacie 58:19
Ah, it's okay. He is just starting to see a little bit of retinopathy, he said, to get a laser on his eyes to just kind of stop up some bleeds. Other than that, I mean, he's got high blood pressure, high cholesterol and a host of other issues outside of diabetes. But he is a full time like, he goes out he has a farm that he works on all day. Like he's, he's physically capable. He's very busy and he doesn't feel badly.

Scott Benner 58:55
For my farming snowballs, there's got to be a lot of work.

Lacie 58:59
Actually, beef cattle, we got a lot of cows up in our prairie area. It's not

Scott Benner 59:03
that it's icicles. He's a cattle farmer. Yeah, in northern Ontario. Wow. That's kind of cool. That sounds like like something I would want on my LinkedIn profile. But I guess the cattle farmer wouldn't have a LinkedIn profile. So whatever. Actually, I

Lacie 59:18
think they do. I mean, farming is big business. No, no, I

Scott Benner 59:20
know. I just didn't think they would be bothered with it. It just seems like that would people to me. I guess I wanted to make that bad joke so badly.

Lacie 59:32
You've worked so hard to get that in there and

Scott Benner 59:37
I don't care. I'll give away the editing time for this. Well, so that's good, but And how about your health?

Lacie 59:46
Oh, it's it's much better since I've managed to get everything under control. I mean, COVID kind of messed up my whole gym routine, but beyond that, like, yeah, my just went for an idea. doctor's visit. And he looked at my eyes. He's like, wait a second, I saw in your chart that you're diabetic. It's like, yeah, it's like that. Oh, okay. I would not have known that otherwise, which is what you want to hear, right?

Scott Benner 1:00:10
100% A The only thing I would want to hear more as Yeah, I found a podcast after that, because I just I'm looking for a spread of word. But that's not. I think that's amazing. I think that's super exciting for you. Because there's no doubt that on the path you were on, you wouldn't be here that much longer. I don't think,

Lacie 1:00:27
no, I still don't know how I frankly, survived from the age of about 18 to 23. I got someone looking out for me up there, because there was no other way that I didn't put myself into a coffin.

Scott Benner 1:00:41
Wow. Yeah, I do. It's such an underserved time. For Type ones. Is that college age? And really, you call it college age, if you want. But you know, that last part while your brains forming still? Yeah, like right in there. It's it's your outside of your parents purview? You're 100% sure that you know everything about the whole world, not just diabetes. You know, like I love I love during political cycles listening to like, 20 year old people. Like this is the first time they they think they're the first people who, who ever noticed that the world might not be exactly right. It's like, none of us knew we're big dummies, you figured it out. Great job. Yeah, in that moment, you know, and you just think, yeah, I guess you do really feel either. Like you need to put this thing aside and not deal with it. Because it's too much. You don't know what you're doing? Or you feel a little invincible or a mixture of those things, I guess. But yeah, that's a scary time. From my perspective, at least.

Lacie 1:01:47
Oh, yeah. And I mean, at that point, I thought I was bulletproof. Right. Like I went on a six month volunteer program to BC and then Ukraine. Wow. Wow, having absolutely no control over my blood sugar's I'm saving

Scott Benner 1:02:02
the beaver population.

Lacie 1:02:05
In BC, it wasn't beavers, what were we working on? We did do a lot of environmental work when I was in DC. And then in Ukraine, I was doing work for a university over there. Again, kind of environmentally focused, but a little bit less, because they still don't have like regular recycling programs and things like that. So

Scott Benner 1:02:25
well, well, you're like a decent person on top of all this.

No, I mean, like I didn't, like you know, like, that's a kind thing to give your time to. Where'd you meet the husband? Guy? Where'd you find him?

Lacie 1:02:40
Ah, through friends at college. In Toronto.

Scott Benner 1:02:44
It's a setup, like a blind date.

Lacie 1:02:47
Not so much. It was more. One of my friends was seeing one of his friends. And so we went over to their apartment. And those two kind of wandered off and Morgan and I were just kind of left there being like, Hi.

Scott Benner 1:03:05
This is awkward. I'm not showing you my vagina like she's going to do. So you know? Oh, yeah, pretty much actually. That's 100% what happened? So she brought you you were you were the wing woman, you were brought along for cover, so that she could safely go off and do whatever it was she was thinking of doing? Yeah, pretty much, and then you got bored. But that boy boobs is that about what?

Lacie 1:03:28
Not that day.

Scott Benner 1:03:31
Try to imagine how funny this is gonna sound bleeped out when I'm talking. Because then people will fill in like right now all of you listening. Whatever you filled in. That's how you feel just because you don't know what I said. I might have said, keychain. You have no idea how long you guys been together?

Lacie 1:03:55
We've been together for nine or 10 years, and we just got married almost two years ago.

Scott Benner 1:04:02
Congratulations. Thank you. You're right before COVID You got married.

Lacie 1:04:06
Literally September of 2019. Right before COVID

Scott Benner 1:04:09
snuck it in. You're probably a super spreader. You didn't even know it.

Lacie 1:04:13
We have a lot of friends who are kind of family friends who now they were trying to get married in 2020. And all our parents are just like, Thank God, you guys got married and

Scott Benner 1:04:24
my son was supposed to go to a wedding in the middle of COVID which of course got pushed. And he's like, Oh, I got another invitation for when I said they're gonna break up before they get married. So much time, you know, good. Oh, I know. I feel so bad for these people. It really is crazy. Are you guys thinking of making any little Canadians or what are you doing?

Lacie 1:04:46
Well, that was part of the reason why I found your podcast. I was looking for podcasts on diabetes management to get ready for pregnancy. So yeah, we are in the process

Scott Benner 1:04:59
of You're having a lot of banging constantly, Scott. Nothing's happening. I don't know. I frankly am tired of it. Oh my God, is he gonna do that again? Again, buddy. Read a book. What are you doing? I can't We can't do it the same way every time. Oh god. That's interesting. Did you hear the episode that Jenny and I did for the pro tips?

Lacie 1:05:27
The pregnancy one?

Scott Benner 1:05:28
Yes. It's good, right? It is. Yeah,

Lacie 1:05:30
all the pro tips have been really good.

Scott Benner 1:05:32
Well, I wasn't looking for that. But I appreciate you saying that. How about listening to Sam attr trimesters was that help? She was

Lacie 1:05:38
actually the first episode that I found was I think her second trimester was the the first episode that I ran across. And then from there started listening to the rest of the

Scott Benner 1:05:48
let me correct myself, Samantha. It's a, I would call her Sam. And she'd be like, Samantha, I'm like, I'm sorry. I don't know why I can't, I would write it down in front of myself. I really am. Like, I'm probably like four IQ points away from falling over, you know, just get right in front of myself. I'd look at even when you and I were messing with technical problems at the beginning. Like your your zoom comes up. I'm assuming your name and your husband's name together.

Lacie 1:06:13
Yeah, it is. Yeah,

Scott Benner 1:06:14
I know. You're Lacey. And I'm still saying your husband's name bom bom like fighting with a thing. I'm like, once I got it done, I was like, am I gonna bring that up? And now just let it go. And for all the things I understand, it's fascinating how dumb I am about other stuff. But anyway, is there anything that we didn't talk about that you were hoping to get to?

Lacie 1:06:33
I don't really think so. No, I think we covered everything.

Scott Benner 1:06:35
Cool. I enjoyed this. I love you. Fine. Yeah, I know. I know. You're just human like me, you just live slightly north of me. And there's really nothing different, except you said a boot and a couple of other things. But I just I don't know, I always enjoy my Canadian conversations. I always feel bad that it takes longer for you guys to get your technology when it comes out.

Lacie 1:06:56
Yeah, that's that's mostly just to do with our more rigorous testing processes. I mean, your FDA tends to let things through pretty easy. Ours is a bit more complicated. So we always get delayed.

Scott Benner 1:07:07
It's funny. It's funny that you that you see it that way because I think Americans would see the FDA as a long process to since

Lacie 1:07:14
Oh, it absolutely is. And doing the FDA processes probably makes everything else quicker. But I mean, there's a lot of stuff you guys have that they've just said no up here too. So

Scott Benner 1:07:22
yeah, well, if you just get an uglier Prime Minister, things might go better. Yeah, we'll see. Just the next time. Just pick the oldest beat up person on the list. Just be like, That guy doesn't look like he never looks in a mirror. This woman hasn't seen a mirror in 20 years. I'm voting for her. Do you get?

Lacie 1:07:37
Um, yeah, we we vote? Of course we vote?

Scott Benner 1:07:40
I don't know. Of course you vote. It's Catala you live on Mars in my world? I don't know you could be living under martial law. I have no idea. I don't know if that. In my mind. There are penguins telling you what to do. So I don't

Lacie 1:07:53
run into the planet. But during the winter.

Scott Benner 1:07:56
The point I'm trying to make is I understand penguins don't live in Canada and yeah, when I when I think of Canada, I think of penguins. Dudley do right? Beavers, bears moose, part of me believes you ride a moose. Like there's just I'm Oh no, I stay

Lacie 1:08:14
very far away from most things scare the crap out of me.

Scott Benner 1:08:17
No kidding. And then when you said you went to the Ukraine, do you have any idea how hard it was for me not to do a moose and squirrel impression in that moment. But I held it in. That's all. I wonder how many people are like moose and squirrel. What is this guy talk? I'm old. I know about cartoon cam bowling. Before people were born, I know stuff. I know useless stuff. And nothing about Canada. I'll go there one day. I know this is gonna happen. I know one day someone's gonna be like, come to Canada. Talk about it. I'm going to show up. I'll land on an airplane. I get out of the plane. I'll be like, this looks like everywhere else I've ever been.

Lacie 1:08:50
You live in New Jersey. That's just like a hop, skip and a jump away from us. Like it's very, very similar.

Scott Benner 1:08:57
I just know I'll like walk. I'll be so disappointed. One day I'll walk outside and like I won't be attacked by a bear. And I'll be like, god dammit. This is the same as everywhere else. No, that's what's gonna happen. Anyway, that's why I'm not going I don't want the illusion ruined.

Lacie 1:09:11
Oh, we're like a magical fantasy land to you. You can't you can't really see the reality.

Scott Benner 1:09:15
That's your policemen are riding on horses. In my mind in big red coats. I think it's lovely.

Lacie 1:09:21
I mean, they usually only do that to clear the drunks off King Street in Toronto.

Scott Benner 1:09:26
So those people do exist though. They do Yeah, they use the horses

Lacie 1:09:29
to they go like breast a breast across the street and just drive all the drunk people home

Scott Benner 1:09:36
there's that many drunk people

Lacie 1:09:38
on King Street in Toronto? Oh yes. King streets like the the entertainment district. There's a lot of bars on King Street.

Scott Benner 1:09:44
Well, listen, I wish you luck with the making the baby thing. I mean, you're fed up with this sex. You're like, it's enough already. Let's be done.

Lacie 1:09:56
Or you just gotta just gotta try different things that keeps it fun. Yeah,

Scott Benner 1:09:59
no, I know. You know, it'll take the fun away. Oh, baby. Yep. There's, there's no, there's nothing that so conflicts with itself as the process. Although your husband will look back on this time later and feel lucky about this that it took, like, I remember when we had Arden first time, she got pregnant the first time and I felt ripped off in a way that is difficult to put into words. It's just like, how could it have happened the first time

Unknown Speaker 1:10:30
process just completely cut short. And we didn't even do this was supposed to

Scott Benner 1:10:34
be fun. I might have put this in my book, but we did it like rushing out the door to go trick or treating with my son. Like, she was like, this is when we should start trying and I was like, okay, she's like, well, he's putting on his costume upstairs with your mom. This is so dirty. She's so we ran to the Arden was conceived in a basement. I just want to say that right now. And that's right, Arden, in case you didn't know. And you're like 30 years old, listen to this now. But you know, it wasn't a I wouldn't call it, you know, a loving moment. It's more of like, I think we can get

Lacie 1:11:08
this in your on a time schedule. Yeah, by the way, there was.

Scott Benner 1:11:11
There was no pun intended there. But I think we can get this in before we leave for this for the triggers and the readings. And then we did and then she was pregnant and like no time and I was like, Oh, come on. That was I don't know. All right. Well, I'm gonna let you go. You're probably sore.

Lacie 1:11:30
Yeah, I got to go do some stretches. Now.

Scott Benner 1:11:32
See, Canadian women have a great sense of humor. This one from the podcast, but I'm not kidding. By the way. I've totally learned this from the podcast. Not that other women don't but you guys are.

Lacie 1:11:43
Well, we're the butt of everyone's jokes. You kind of have to get a good sense of humor. Eventually.

Scott Benner 1:11:47
We Canadians.

Lacie 1:11:49
Have you have never watched a comedy special from any American comedian like Canadians are always that show.

Scott Benner 1:11:56
I mean, really, all we really know about you is that movie strange brew. There's nothing else. That's probably part of the problem. I mean, you sent us that Dave Coulier a guy you should have sent somebody better. I don't know what to tell you. I mean, I didn't mean

Lacie 1:12:09
we did send you Brendan Fraser at one point, which was he was pretty awesome

Scott Benner 1:12:14
for five seconds. And Alan Thicke was fine, but then he made that boy, now I'm stuck with him. Robin?

Lacie 1:12:21
Yeah, yeah, we try forget about that one.

Scott Benner 1:12:24
I am. I will say this before I go. I am endlessly fascinated that hockey is not more popular in America than it is such a good sport.

Lacie 1:12:34
It's great. But the problem is it's so bloody expensive to try and put your kids in it.

Scott Benner 1:12:39
Oh, playing it's tough baseball. Yeah, baseball similar here. You have to because it's not just something you can get. Just pick up a ball a ball and do it. You have to have a future mindset, a field and etc. And it makes it

Lacie 1:12:51
Yeah, I mean, I played baseball, softball, because apparently girls can play baseball in Canada. But it wasn't that expensive. Like all I had to bring was my glove my cleats. coaches were the ones who had to bring bags and bags of bats and everything else and

Scott Benner 1:13:07
hockey's the skates and the pads and the you have to have a ring

Lacie 1:13:10
and God forbid someone has a kid who wants to play goalie.

Scott Benner 1:13:14
All that stuff, too. Yeah. All right. Well, I guess you're I'm just telling you it's as a spectator sport goes. Hockey's amazing. Oh, hockey. It's great. But I don't know you guys are having trouble marketing it. And you put that handsome guy on that and see what you can figure out.

Lacie 1:13:29
Also, I think you guys have a harder time sitting in a cold arena.

Scott Benner 1:13:33
I'm cold was working out for a college one day baseball in the bathrooms were in the hockey rink next door. And just walking in the outskirts of it to the restroom. You needed a jacket. It was the middle of summer so cold in there. I mean, it makes sense. I'm not an idiot. Like, I know there's trying to keep ice frozen. But I can't imagine being a parent having to sit there. Like no matter what time of year it is, like bundled up to watch a hockey game, I guess.

Lacie 1:13:59
Yeah. So we're used to it. I mean, when it gets to be winter here doesn't matter where in the country you are, you're cold. So it's just like, oh, that's fine. But I imagine people living in you know, South Carolina might not be so interested in sitting in a freezing cold

Scott Benner 1:14:15
or making a point. Well, yes, no ball farmers are not bothered by the cold. That's for certain. No, they definitely aren't. That's all. Alright, but this was lovely. You're delightful. Thank you very much. Thank you. It's

Lacie 1:14:26
great talking to you. Yeah,

Scott Benner 1:14:27
I agree. It was great talk note is great talking to you too.

I'd like to thank Lacey for coming on the show today and sharing her story with us. And I also want to thank Dexcom, makers of the Dexcom G six continuous glucose monitor and Omni pod makers have the Omni pod dash and the Omni pod promise for being sponsors of the Juicebox Podcast. Don't forget to check them out at Omni pod.com forward slash juicebox and tech comm.com forward slash juice box. When you support the sponsors, you're supporting the show. If you're a US resident or the caretaker of a US resident, and you have type one diabetes, T one D exchange.org, forward slash juice box, take the survey, less than 10 minutes support people living with type one, and again, support the Juicebox Podcast. I want to thank you for listening today and remind you to subscribe and follow in an audio app. While I have your attention. Let me let you know about the Facebook page for the podcast completely free. But private Juicebox Podcast type one diabetes 20,000 members and growing people just like you looking for support community and maybe sometimes a virtual hug or a little bit of advice for another type one Juicebox Podcast, type one diabetes on Facebook. If you're enjoying the show, please go into that audio app that you're listening in and leave a fantastic five star review. It helps other people to find the show and to get started. Thank you so much for listening. I'll be back very soon with another episode of The Juicebox Podcast.

#608 Diabetes Pro Tip: Honeymoon

Scott and Jenny Smith, CDE share insights on type 1 diabetes care

You can always listen to the Juicebox Podcast here but the cool kids use: Apple Podcasts/iOS - Spotify - Amazon Music - Amazon Alexa - Google Play/Android - iHeart Radio - Radio Public or their favorite podcast app.

+ Click for EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Scott Benner 0:00
Hello friends, and welcome to episode 608 of the Juicebox Podcast.

Today I bring you the 25th installment of the diabetes Pro Tip series. On this episode Jenny Smith and I will discuss honeymooning. I know that a honeymoon can be very difficult to navigate both during it. And as it ends. It's difficult for parents of children with type one as well as newly diagnosed adults. So today, Jenny and I are going to do a deep dive on it. I think it's going to help you. Please remember, while you're listening that nothing you hear on the Juicebox Podcast should be considered advice, medical or otherwise, always consult a physician before making any changes to your health care plan are becoming bold with insulin. If you're looking for the rest of the Pro Tip series, it's available diabetes pro tip.com, juicebox podcast.com, where you can go right into your podcast app right now. Hit search and look for diabetes pro tip Juicebox Podcast, they should all pop right up. But there's great lists on the website.

If you're looking for community around type one diabetes, or diabetes in general, you should really check out the Facebook page for the Juicebox Podcast. It's called Juicebox Podcast, type one diabetes. All you have to do is search for it in your Facebook app, answer a couple of membership questions. And the next thing you know you'll be in there with like 20,000 people living with type one and type two diabetes. You can ask questions, make friends, use this space, any way that's best suited for you just lurk if you want. There's a lot to learn just by looking Juicebox Podcast, type one diabetes on Facebook. I know. I know what you're thinking Facebook, people are going to argue and complain it's going to be horrible. But this group really is special. There's not a lot of that going on in there. And I think you'll like it. Just give it a shot Juicebox Podcast, type one diabetes. Last thing before we get started. If you have type one diabetes, or you're the caregiver of someone who has type one diabetes, and you're a US resident, in less than 10 minutes, you can take a survey that will help people living with type one. It's AT T one D exchange.org. Forward slash juicebox. I've taken the survey myself, it really does just take a few minutes you can do it from your phone or your laptop or wherever is 100% HIPAA compliant and absolutely anonymous. It really does help people living with type one, give it a look. T one D exchange.org. Forward slash juicebox. Okay, so we're recording, I want to tell you that this lovely woman named Isabel has been helping me with the Facebook pitch. And she came to me recently and said, You need a pro tip for female hormones and you need a pro tip for the end of a honeymoon. She said these are things that people ask about constantly. And they must not feel like they're getting what they need out of the podcast on this. Now Jenny, you know, in my heart, the end of the honeymoon just means use more insulin. And when you get your period it means use more insulin but darn it, let's let's just dig into it and find out that the details Okay.

Jennifer Smith, CDE 3:47
Sure. Yes, they're both good. Good topics. Yeah,

Scott Benner 3:50
the details are apparently what is needed, and I am happy to deliver what is needed. And by that, I mean dig it out of your head and record it so people can hear it. Sure. Okay. Because my only experience with honeymooning that my only experience that I'm aware of personally with honeymooning because Arden had diabetes, you know, was diagnosed so long ago, and we had a little meter and some needles. I mean, I didn't really know what was happening in her. So the one thing that I can tell you is that I called my friend who was my children's pediatrician one day, and I I told you this before, but it fits in this this episode. So let's put it here. And I told him I preface my conversation by saying I know what I'm about to say is ridiculous. But is there any chance Arden doesn't have diabetes? And he said and he sounded sad. I think sad that I asked him and he's and he said why? And I said, Well, she hasn't needed insulin for about a day and a half now. Right? And that lasted maybe? I don't know. 72 hours. And then it was just going. Yeah, anyway, that's my entire personal experience with honeymooning but I know how difficult it can be for everybody. So,

Jennifer Smith, CDE 5:10
well, another good question. And that I mean, as you sort of began with, I just give more insulin right? Well, a good piece of honeymoon is or coming out of honeymoon, right? You're, you've kind of moved through that lack of insulin need or really, really, some people can get by on just Basal insulin. They might not need anything for their meals or their blood sugar's don't go high enough to correct or anything right. But did you notice also that after that, like, three ish days, that her insulin needs were higher than they were before that?

Scott Benner 5:48
Well, here's the here's the honest answer. I don't know. I didn't know. You don't remember. No, no, forget that. I don't remember. I didn't know what I was doing. Right. So like, I think that feeling maybe encapsulates more honeymooning and the and the leaving of honeymooning for people more than anything like, right. So somebody you or your child gets type one. It's a whirlwind. It's you know, and if you're honeymooning, insulin needs are changing kind of radically sometimes. So just when you maybe get the nerve to, I don't know, Bolus two units of a Basal, you know, and then the next day Your fight is 60, blood sugar all day that won't go up. And then the next day, you think, well, maybe I shouldn't use the two units of Basal and then you don't and then your body doesn't help that day and your blood sugar's 300. All day. That uncertainty, I think, is the main characteristic of honeymooning, don't you

Jennifer Smith, CDE 6:42
true and honeymoon is it is really different person to person, as well as the like, movement out of honeymooning is different person to person, like you didn't have art and didn't have a very long honeymoon at all. And that's not uncommon from the studies that have been done. It's not uncommon with kids under the age of five who are diagnosed, to have a much more rapid rapid onset of type one very quick, very aggressive, really high blood sugars, you know, unless they've been watching for it, or they know because of previous antibody testing that it could be coming, you know, DKA, all of those kinds of things. And what that results in is causing enough of the betas to be stressed enough and the body kind of decreasing them enough in, you know, in amount that now diabetes presents itself, okay? So but in older kids, and especially in adults, there is often a slower progression of type one, like, you know, here it is, yeah, and all those symptoms, and that often leaves more betas in the picture. Also, what's been found is that the sooner you get containment of blood sugars after diagnosis, you give some relief to those beta cells. And because now, you know, you're either injecting or you're pumping insulin. And so that's something that's helping to take care of the blood sugar levels. And your betas that do remain can actually help out and so honeymoon then often comes in, you know, where, usually somewhere between about one to four months post diagnosis is the typical like, honeymoon, time to expect that to come into the picture and how long it can last again as person to person, it could be a couple months, it could be three days, it could be a year or two that you continue to have this like lack of more typical insulin need.

Scott Benner 8:54
It's the consistency that you're that you're missing and, and yeah, that breaks people's hearts I think I'll tell you after interviewing so many people, I've heard, I believe every variation of time and distance about honeymooning from adults and children and crazy stories where blood sugars are suddenly super normal super out of whack. One lady I'll never forget told me like she thinks her honeymoon lasted years. And then I'm wondering like, is that? Is that honeymoon? Or is it a slow onset? Like is that like, and I guess it doesn't really matter, right? Like, what matters is that you're using insulin now. And in there's going to be this variability to how much until things I guess you could just say settle but obviously it's not settle. It's until your beta cells give up. Right right completely. Do do some people just not see a honeymoon at all. What does that mean? And they're not aware of it. In talking

Jennifer Smith, CDE 9:53
with so many people that I have, and you know, it's always something I asked about his diagnosis. If somebody wants to talk about it, you know, or if it's been very, very soon after I get to talk or, you know, before I get to talk to them, it's been very close to that time period. And it seems like, again, everybody is a little bit different. A little people again, very little people tend to be the ones that I hear the most, we didn't notice very much honeymoon, or, you know, parents are concerned, because they're like, I don't know, I feel like we never had a honeymoon, I feel like, we never needed just like a little bit of insulin, we just went from not using any really using insulin, you know.

Scott Benner 10:37
So functionally, how do people deal with it? So when, you know, let's say, I came to you and I said, Hey, here's my seven year old kid, yesterday, this Basal, and this meal ratio worked perfectly. Today, it's a hot mess. And I'm saving low blood sugars all over the place. I don't know what's gonna happen tomorrow. But as I look back, this is bouncing around. It's two days of this one day of that. But how do you find reasonable stability until things get normalized?

Jennifer Smith, CDE 11:12
Well, some of it again, in that early time period is it's a bit of estimation, you can base it on Well, yesterday was a really sensitive day, if it looks like we fought low blood sugars all night. And we're entering morning time again, today, with lower blood sugar's yet again, that's a good visual that maybe today needs to be covered similar to yesterday, or even less aggressively than yesterday, right. So some high insight can help. But then, you know, tomorrow morning, you wake up high. If you didn't do anything strange overnight, and you're all of a sudden, high, today might be one of those days that you're going to need more insulin. And so it, it's hard because it takes out of the picture, a lot of the things that we've done. In other we've discussed in other episodes, like testing, right, and doing things like Basal testing, in this time period, it's kind of hard, because you don't really know exactly day to day, how things are going to move overall, the general idea that kids before puberty, once remission, has kind of gone away, right? Once that honeymoon period, you're expecting it's over. Insulin needs usually are about point seven to one unit per kilogram per day of insulin.

Scott Benner 12:34
Say it again,

Jennifer Smith, CDE 12:36
point seven to one unit per kilogram per day of insulin. So and if you don't know, pound two kilogram conversion, just take your pound weight and divide it by 2.2. And you'll have your weight in kilograms. But that's a it's a, it's a baseline, you know, if you were really, really, really low to begin with, and now you're doing a really low carb diet as well. You may not really see that insulin dosing kind of go along with what we would expect in terms of overall insulin need, right? Usually, people are considered in remission, if they're at, you know, point five or less point five units per kilogram per day or less of insulin. And then, you know, once you get to puberty, gosh, I mean, you could use anywhere between a unit to two units of insulin a day during puberty, and that's completely normal. Absolutely, and completely normal. So if you're not so sensitive anymore, you definitely see these swings in blood sugar, you know, especially in that growth period overnight or in the aftermath of meals and is lasting and lasting and lasting. guarantee you're probably not in honeymoon anymore.

Scott Benner 13:50
Well, you know, you I've said it to you have said to everybody listening, you have to meet the need. And I don't know, it's clear enough about that. But if one day the need is greater than meet the greater need and if one day the the need is lesser than meet the lesser need and, and flexibilities just it's completely key. It's what you're saying. It's like you have to sort of I don't think that I don't think that during honeymoon you want to look real macro. Not all the time, right? You want to kind of just deal with diabetes and segments of it of half days or hours or something like that. Like here's what's happening right now. If it starts trending one way, then adjust with it if it starts trending the other way then adjust with it. But I don't think there's a lot of value unless you're matching an apples to apples day and going well last Thursday. You know she was really low so I don't want to be aggressive six days later. You don't I mean like today's got no no Yeah, yeah, there's no correlation between now six days ago when you're in this honeymoon fluctuation. And I know that people We're gonna think I'm flipping but I think you could just retitle this episode, diabetes pro tip ministration. And I don't know that we're gonna say too many different things when we get to it, which is why maybe for some people, they gloss over it when we talk about these basic ideas of like, it's not always going to be the same all the time, you can't always ask for a cut and dry answer. I mean, if you want to get through a honeymoon period, and it's, it's particularly, you know, Rocky, I think that just staying flexible, meeting the need, you know, taking a little bit of historical knowledge off of days that were similar to the one you're experiencing now. I think that's really the whole thing.

Jennifer Smith, CDE 15:45
I think that's the best that you can do oftentimes, especially in honeymoon, and then even, you know, coming out of honeymoon, there's, I know, some people use the word like it becomes more stable. Okay. Sure. More stable in the fact that you're not like giving only one unit and that whole talk takes care of your whole day. Yeah, yes, absolutely.

Scott Benner 16:12
But yeah, or that one day, the units necessary. And then the next day, it's not necessary. But there's,

Jennifer Smith, CDE 16:19
I think there's more consistency is, is it exactly and I mean, in honeymoon, again, there are ups their downs, yes, you can, you can choose to use insulin from some hindsight from, again, I know, on a really, really busy day like this, my child needs a lot less insulin, but is running high today. Okay. Again, it's the then meet the need in terms of where the blood sugar is right now. And thankfully, these days, I mean, you didn't have an I certainly didn't, as a kid have any visible to where my blood sugar was going at all. It was a one number, it could be rising in 10 minutes, it could be dropping in 10 minutes. And that's what

Scott Benner 17:03
it was. I wonder sometimes when I'm like, I'm speaking to this person, now, who's got a very small child who I think still their needs are, well, they're not honeymooning, they were just, they had too much Basal going. So it's, you know, by using too much Basal, they were getting drops, that didn't seem to make sense, right. And so it took a day or two to figure out that the Basal was too high, to bring it down a little bit. But in there, while we were trying to figure it out, this person was using pens. And so they were relegated to point five units at a time, right, and I just said you have syringes, and she did was like, just eyeball less than a half. Next time we go for this meal, and did that and fixed a lot of their problems. So while this kind of unseen force, obviously, I'm talking about Basal that we needed to fix though, but you know, let the unseen force be, you know, your pancreas working all of a sudden, was dropping or down? If the limiting factor was the was the measurement on this on the pen. And then you like, for some reason, your brain doesn't jump over that and go, Well, this might be too much. But your brain says this is all I'm able to do. Do you know, I mean, like, and so but the minute we dropped down to like these quarter of units, then suddenly, there was far fewer spikes in the meals, and then far fewer lows afterwards. And I'm just wondering, like, during the honeymoon period? If you are that scared of these crazy drops? Do you maybe just draw back your Basal a little bit? And then on days when that Basal is not enough, just increase your meal insulin a little? Or do you mean like, because also these these poor people are probably MDI in this moment?

Jennifer Smith, CDE 18:55
Correct. Most often, and like you said, unless they have, you know, half half unit dosed or marked syringes in which yes, if you've got to, to get good eyes, or you have a good magnifying glass, you can get kind of a quarter unit fish in there, whatever it might be. They've got a good friend that does just that, and she's done it for a long time, and it works great for her. But again, you have to kind of use those microscopic doses and on pens, it's a hard thing to definitely do because all you can get is a half a unit. I mean, I think on pumps, honestly in honeymoon and I know a lot of clinics often don't encourage people to start pumping until honeymoon is expected to be almost over. And I sometimes I agree with that. Sometimes I don't agree with that. I think it kind of is individual in need. You have to look at what people are able to do and kind of a knowledge base of where are you already but those doses they do, they do shift and change through honeymoon. And then, you know, going out of honeymoon, you can expect the doses to definitely increase your child, your TN, your, you know, adult that you're living with or your partner to or whatever you're going to expect that their doses are going to increase. And while kids are growing at the same time as coming out of honeymoon, there are a lot of factors there. Another piece in the mix that often shifts things to higher insulin, and we've talked about it before we talked about illness and management is that if a child is also sick, within honeymooning and is now requiring more insulin, then by the end of the illness, they may actually either leave honeymoon sooner, or they may just be still at a higher insulin need as during the illness, the pancreatic beta cells were trying to assist, and there aren't very many of them left. So they were getting stressed out and can all can leave less than Yeah. So

Scott Benner 21:07
that's interesting. Yeah, I think that. So I think that the next step here, I mean, besides telling people like, look, it's gonna happen, you know, if it's happening, it's flexibility is key, it's going to be a little more stressful, but only if you I guess, only if you're looking macro when you should be looking micro. And then vice versa. Like you just talked about a lot, a number of ideas where you do want to pull back and see the big picture, but not about the fluctuations day to day those you kind of got to get on like a bowl and ride them, you can't step back and have an existential conversation about whether or not you should be bull riding, you know, so. But but the other stuff, are there illnesses, is there growth, you know, activity, those things are, those are big picture items. So now, okay, so now you've figured out a way to ride through this honeymoon, the thing that I see from people over and over again, is that when it ends, you know, like when the honeymoons over, they can't believe it. They can't pull the trigger. They can't ramp up. Think about it any way you want to. But they get stuck in the game, and don't recognize that the game changed.

Jennifer Smith, CDE 22:23
Yeah, I think the big thing there is that, especially in honeymoon, the sensitivity to insulin makes people very wary of using more. Right, right, because you can get burned, right, by using more thinking you needed more, because yesterday, it clearly didn't work with this, you know, lunch that we provided we're giving the same lunch today. So I'm going to be more aggressive, you know, gave a quarter unit yesterday, today, I'm definitely giving a half a unit and then on the back end of the drop happens, right? The good thing to know is that in, you know, the coming out of honeymoon kind of moving out of that that phase is that you will have again, more consistency in more need for insulin, you won't have as much potential for those drops, where you learned they typically happened even if it wasn't every day, you probably got a good idea of where things needed to be lower in dose or, you know, that won't necessarily be the case. Once you're out of honeymoon,

Scott Benner 23:36
I feel like you I mean, when I tell people about it, I say you just kind of have to reset at that moment. That's when you go back to the setting Basal insulin pro tip, you start over again, you get the Basal straight, you reevaluate how long your Pre-Bolus time is, you reevaluate your meal insulin after you've re evaluated your Basal insulin. And you just kind of start over that. The truth is, is that I think that the transition from honeymoon to out of honeymoon is not actually much different sometimes than the transition from MDI, to pumping in that it's just the it's the same game different players, like I don't know how to like, how to think of it, it's like, you know, right church, wrong, pew. I don't know what the what the the thing is, like you're doing the same thing. But the pieces have all just sort of adjusted a little bit. And you have to just step back, take what you know about the thing you've been doing, and reapply it to the new situation.

Jennifer Smith, CDE 24:31
Right? Correct. And with pumping, you know that you've got a lot more precision that comes along with that. So if you've been doing things as precisely as possible with let's say, Just half units, right, and Basal that's given once or maybe twice a day. Now you can really address where insulin needs are heavier and are lighter through the course of a 24 hour days. Yeah, you can meet the need more precisely, thus, the benefit of doing some Basal testing again, even if you're just doing it overnight, and everybody wants to sleep. So if there's one time a day that you're going to do it, do it overnight,

Scott Benner 25:14
get that part done, get that part done. And you steal a bunch of a one C and some just good feelings. In general, if you're, if you're thinking all 24 hours are just a train wreck, like maybe you can at least get eight or nine of them straight, you know, and say, and it's a jumping off point, figure out the rest of the day. I think that when you were saying something a minute ago, this thought just jumped into my head, and I'm gonna put it here. And I think it fits. I think no matter the situation, maybe I'm talking about just diabetes or life in general. But do something is often the answer. People, there's a people freeze, wondering what the something should be. But if you're watching the same thing happen over and over and over again, if you just change the variables, the stressors on the situation, you might see something new, that helps you understand a bigger picture something different. And so, you know, if blood sugars are, I mean, I don't think it's a joke. But like online, sometimes somebody will throw up a graph and be like, I don't know what's wrong with this. And I'll literally just type more insulin. Because put in some more and watch what happens and then go Oh, cause and effect if they want to know where

Jennifer Smith, CDE 26:29
Right, yeah, not just more like, but where should I put that more insult

Scott Benner 26:35
thing, though, it's like do something right? Like, if you haven't been on vacation in 15 years, take $5 a week and put it in an envelope, you know, do something, try to change the situation a little bit. And I get that it's frightening. And I used to think, Jenny, I used to think that all these things that I saw around diabetes, were so specific to diabetes, but I've been having some personal things going on with my mom's health recently, which Jenny knows about? Probably not. Yeah, about right away. But but the point is, is that I recognize that the confusion, and the the lack of knowing when to jump and feeling like you're overwhelmed and feeling like you don't understand what to do next. It's life, not diabetes, right. And maybe it feels a little more dire in some situations than others. You know what I mean? Like standing in the store, trying to decide between two waxes for your car might not be as crazy as I wonder if I want to add three more Basal units to my kid or something like that. But the truth is, is that that inaction, that's what keeps you where you're at. So if you're sitting where you don't want to be, do something,

Jennifer Smith, CDE 27:47
right, and easier one to honestly do, let's say you are running high, you know, all day long, and you're higher after meals, but you're still just stuck high in that scenario, and a safer thing is just add a little bit more Basal add just a little bit more Basal, right. If instead, in time periods where you're not actually eating, it doesn't look too bad. And then you've got these big excursions after you eat just about, you know, anything, even a microscopic eight grams of carb, maybe and it goes rocketing up, well, then you may be okay with Basal and maybe the next place to add more. And again, not three units more, but maybe add a half a unit or adjust your insulin to carb ratio by one gram to get a little bit more insulin around the times that you see the change that you don't want to see happening.

Scott Benner 28:45
Yeah. Arden's been getting up in the morning going to school, and her blood sugar has been rising. This this school year, like 30 points in the morning. I tried to let the algorithm mess with it didn't work. I tried making just some simple Basal adjustments wasn't enough. And then finally I just said doors like when you leave the house from now on, we just Bolus three units, please. And she's like, what I was like, just throw in three units, get the car, go to school. I was like, because whatever's happening is happening enough. I believe it's happening. I trust that what I know is going to happen is going to happen. And she's using an algorithm. So if you make an uncovered Bolus, it removes her Basal immediately. So her Basal is like 1.2 in the morning. So I figured it was about a unit and a half or so to fix the number or to get ahead of the number. And we got to cover the Basal that's gone. So it's like just three. And then we adjusted off of that and did a little too much the next day we did a little less. The next day, we had a better outcome. The next day she forgot to do it, you know, on the third day and I was like see it happened again, like you know, like do this thing that made her trust the drive Do it and it becomes a little more important to her. I just think it's another example of do something. Right. You know, I, I've been saying online a lot to people lately. And you'll forgive me because I can't pronounce it in its in its origin language in Latin, but I've been telling people lately, Fortune favors the bold. Just try something, you know, they mean stand up thump your chest and go, I'm gonna take a swing here. Let's see what happens. And then you get back to this stuff you hear in the earlier pro tips, you know?

Jennifer Smith, CDE 30:35
Right. Well, and I think the bigger thing too, that you're, you're bringing in is try something, right? But then analyze what that trying did. Right? Don't just try it and be like, Wow, that clearly didn't work. Like, still focus on it? Well, it didn't work, your adjustment either left you to higher like, you know happened for you caused it to be a little bit too low in the algorithm couldn't really save you from that extra insulin well, but now, you know, so you use that for that information. And you move forward and you say, Okay, tomorrow, we're going to do it this way. I mean, that goes into, you know, a lot of things in terms of kind of the exiting of the honeymoon. It does it's try this, it looks like consistently in the past week, he's needed more insulin, right? Okay, great. You're trying to add more insulin? Is it enough? Is it getting to you to the place that you want to be? Insulin needs may actually continued to climb a little bit. It's not like a night and day like yesterday, we needed one unit and tomorrow, we're gonna need 10 units. That's not typically the exit of honeymoon. But over time, that lack of beta cells that is that was helping you write is going to show up very evidently, in that you don't return to that minimal amount of insulin,

Scott Benner 31:57
when you know what made me do this episode when Isabel told me that she thought it was necessary. It was that I had to get over that thing in my head that it's already in the podcast. Like I was like, No, it's in there already. You just have to listen to it. And then I thought, well, it's in there. But it's in a different way. Because what we just talked about, what about that? It really is the way when I'm when I was talking about God, I don't even know what episode it was not that I guess maybe that's a good point. It's hard to find them all. But But, but when I was talking about like sometimes you know, people's meal insulin right meal ratio, sometimes their insulin to carb ratio can be like spot on for a number of meals, but not work for a certain meal. And I always use that silly example, if you have meatloaf and mashed potatoes and green beans, and you count the carbs. And it says the carbs say Oh, this is five units, you make your Pre-Bolus. You spike, you end up correcting later with two units, which brings you down and you don't get low. Well, the next time you have the meatloaf in the mashed potato, seven units, you use you seven units, right? Like you see it happen. And then you take the leap, you stop looking back at the meal ration going no, that's not right, I counted the carbs, it's right, this is five units, very similarly to the idea of you're using a pen that only goes up to a half a unit and you keep using it and then watching a low blood sugar happen. I go, I'm powerless, but you're not powerless. Like you just need to go get a syringe and do it a different way. And you're not at the mercy of your carb ratio just because it works five days a week, but not on Sunday when you have meatloaf like right. So, right. It's all kind of the same idea. Like right, I know it sounds trite. But

Jennifer Smith, CDE 33:37
well, and that's I think it brings in a good a good piece too, in terms of, you know, multiple daily injections, then we move to pumping, and then we move to the fancy features of pumping. And then you might move to an algorithm driven pump, right? All of these things take. They take like evaluation. And a good example from somebody I worked with a while ago, who had started using one of the algorithm driven pumps, and she was fantastic. I love it. It's working so awesome. But it doesn't work on Friday night. I was like, Okay, well what were you doing on Friday night, that this doesn't work anymore for you. And she had this like, whole thing figured out for her dinner Friday nights that she would go out to with her husband. And on a conventional pump. She could use like, you know, a temporary Basal she could use an extended Bolus and she had it down, Pat, that was like just go to manual mode in your pump and use it that way overnight and Saturday morning. Turn your algorithm back on. She's like, why didn't I think of like, oh, I don't know either, but I hope that it helps and it it seemed to be much better than we did

Scott Benner 34:53
last night. Yeah. Because we went to a bar and art and got nachos with cheese steak on top of it and had French fries, and I crushed my first Bolus. I was like, I haven't been this excited about a Bolus and was like I was on top of it. And then I started seeing the fat rise, and we hit it again. And I was like I was over. And then I go upstairs to start working. And suddenly she jumps up her blood sugar jumps out, but I go downstairs to my lab and see what happened. I had some gummy bears, she told me and I was like, no, no, we can't put simple sugar on top of fat and protein. I was like, are you all out of your minds? Without like, significant I said, Aren't you were going to gummi bears in this situation, the Pre-Bolus would have needed to be causing a fall before you put the bear the bears in, you know. And then that would have been okay, but she just did the like my blood sugar's great thing, threw in some insulin, wait a little while and ate it. And it was not nearly enough. We needed to be more drastic with it. And so I was like, so my text, my text said this, I'll bleep it out. It said it said that it said, open the loop Bolus for you.

Jennifer Smith, CDE 36:06
And let and let the Basal run let's

Scott Benner 36:09
back to normal pumping for a minute and stop asking this algorithm do something that it doesn't know how to do. Because it's

Jennifer Smith, CDE 36:15
not it's not a learning algorithm. Unfortunately, it doesn't, you know, it doesn't react the way that we have the experience to say, I know this is what's going to happen. Please don't fiddle with the insulin that I put in purpose.

Scott Benner 36:32
Now's not the time to take the Basal away algorithm. Yes, gummy bears and cheese stick nachos happening right now. Anyway, Jenny, you know, there was in the past, there was a moment when I, I used to worry. And I think like, Well, we've already said these things. And people will find it. And now I realized that that's not how this is going to work that these continuing conversations are incredibly important. I think maybe the conversational part of this episode, and many episodes is more important even than the technical aspects of what was said inside of it. Right? You know, like, if you listen to the Pro Tip series, and you had your brain or my brain, or your experience, in my experience, you could derive from the Pro Tip series how to manage a honeymoon. But for people who are in that situation, I think they need the information here. Right, you know, in one spot. Yeah. And I just, I don't know if I was just like, super hopeful or lazy. I'm not sure. But I used to think like, just go listen to the pro tip episodes, it explains the whole thing, you know, and it really does. So I appreciate this, I think we're gonna have to, you know, like I said, I want to do one for you know, female hormones, menstruation, that kind of thing. Yeah, specific the next time we record. And then from there, I'm going to say this year, Jenny, because it will put us both on the hook. In 2022. Jenny and I are going to go back to certain pro tip episodes, were going to re listen to them on our time. And then incorporate questions that I'm collecting on Facebook, on how to supercharge those episodes. So they're going to kind of create some of them are going to get a part to kind of a situation. That's cool. That's what that's how we will you and I will spend our time seeing each other through the winter of 2022 sequels to certain episodes. I'm thinking of them as director's cuts for oh, there you go. Yeah, for older people who you remember the directors commentaries? Yes. Yeah. You know, where do you mean you'll flip the movie on and the audio goes away, and you just hear the guy go. In this shot. What I was thinking was that if the sun came in from the left,

Jennifer Smith, CDE 38:41
and we could could pan over here and listen to this music from this producer, you know, whatever. See

Scott Benner 38:47
how missoma Hykes eyes are glistening. i I told the DP like I don't know if you ever listened to them. They're pompous exchanges, Jenny and I will not do that. But we're gonna go back and listen to what we've said. Because I've done it a couple of times, like in Episode 500. I went back to Episode 11. That's bold with insulin. And I listened to it and like talked overtop of it like so people listening and episode. I think it's 100 Oh my god. 100 500. Sorry. In episode 100. I just basically did a director's cut of that, because I realized that when I said it, I was just saying it. Like there was and now I've lived all this time since then, and had these interactions with people that maybe there'd be more to add to that. And I think that exists for the Pro Tip series. Like and I'm excited. I'm sorry that you're gonna start getting emails from me that say please listen to this one before we talk again. But

Jennifer Smith, CDE 39:36
no, that's fine. You're busy and I can do it during my workouts. That's not usually I just That's my mental like, my moving like mental sort of like strategizing time is my exercise time. I am not like a sit in one space and like meditate. I'm a moving meditator But I can meditate on the episodes so we can make them better for everybody else. Excellent.

Scott Benner 40:04
I have a question, then I'll let you go. How do you make out listening to your own voice? Does it freak you out?

Jennifer Smith, CDE 40:12
It's I don't know, it's I guess it's kind of weird to me because I like I hear myself speak, you know, in your brain like, but when you hear yourself, it sounds different. I guess. I don't mind listening to myself. But yeah, I don't know. I don't think that I sound like what I sound like when I listen.

Scott Benner 40:35
No, no, no, I sound so right now we're recording, I can hear you and me and my headphones. I sound different in my headphones than I sound on the recording. And if I'm just speaking out into the world, I don't think I sound like the person on the podcast at all, but people think I do. But in my ear, it doesn't sound the same. Although And do you ever get on you ever? You ever say anything and hear yourself and go? Oh, Jenny, you should not have said it. You should have said it like this? Do you ever correct yourself?

Jennifer Smith, CDE 41:01
I do? Absolutely. And a lot of the ones that I've listened to don't like, oh, this would have been a better explanation. Or I could have put this in as an example. And that would have been better. So maybe we Yes, I think it's great to sort of rethink them. Because then we can add extra and

Scott Benner 41:15
I agree that there's there's just always going to be other stuff to say. And as we move forward into 2022, and beyond more people are going to be using algorithms. And there's going to be a whole new layer of understanding for diabetes, there's going to be things that you and I don't have an experience yet that, that through these experiences over and over again of using this technology, you're gonna come out I don't see an end to this podcast, I used to think it was finite. And now I think somebody is gonna need to, you know, make up a cure for this podcast not to be necessary.

Jennifer Smith, CDE 41:47
So Well, that's what I was gonna say I don't think until there's honestly a true like, you don't have to use any technology or anything. You just go in and get your bloodwork done and make sure your doctors like yep, you still look great. It's all perfect. I don't think you know the information that people need, especially with life changing and everything. I think it's purposeful. So

Scott Benner 42:10
I do too. I appreciate you doing this with me. It's the end of the year. So let me thank you for giving your time so greatly to the podcast.

A huge thanks to Jennifer Smith, my good friend for being on this episode of The Juicebox Podcast. Actually, Jenny does the podcast for fun, but she also does this stuff for a living. So if you'd like to hire her, you can at integrated diabetes.com After the music. I'll give you some agenda specifics. Don't forget the Facebook page for the podcast Juicebox Podcast, type one diabetes 20,000 people strong, just like you looking for advice, community and support from people who understand. Please take advantage of it. It's absolutely free, and really valuable.

My friend Jenny Smith has had type one diabetes for over 33 years. She holds a bachelor's degree in Human Nutrition and biology from the University of Wisconsin. She's a registered and licensed dietitian and certified diabetes educator and a certified trainer and most makes and models of insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitoring systems. She is also on every one of the diabetes pro tip and defining diabetes episodes. You can find those episodes in your podcast player. We're at Juicebox Podcast comm I actually think there's a list on the Facebook page to up in the Announcements section. Is that what they're calling it now that used to call it all a sudden? I'll find out for you. And then I'm going to tell you about the other stuff that you need to know. Yeah, so if you're on the private Facebook group, they call it featured now used to be announcements now it's featured. So if you go to the featured section, you'll find lists of the pro tips how to start listening to the podcast, defining diabetes, all kinds of stuff that you need. Actually, there's lists of ask Scott and Jenny episodes here. All kinds of good stuff. You should check it out. Look at there's so much to choose from special episodes after dark how we eat okay, I'm not going to bore you with this. But by the way, it's not boring. I'm just trying to fill you in. Are you arguing? am I arguing with nobody? Hold on a second. I want to tell you about the diabetes pro tips. So they began back on episode 210. With an episode called newly diagnosed or starting over, I'm going to try to list them for you pretty quickly. Episode 211 all about MDI episode 212 all about insulin episode 217 Pre-Bolus Episode 218 Temp Basal 219 Insulin pumping to 24 mastering a CGM to 25 Bumping nuts To 26 the perfect Bolus to 31 variables to 37 setting Basal insulin 256 exercise to 263 fat and protein 287 illness injury and surgery 301 glucagon and low V Gs 307 Emergency Room protocols 311 long term health 350 Bump and nudge part two 360 for pregnancy 371 explaining type one that's for other people like so you can share it with like a family member, a loved one who needs to understand type one 449 postpartum 470 weight loss and this episode 608 And there's going to be more in fact, there'll be another one next month on female hormones. Thank you so much for listening. If this is your first episode, please subscribe or follow in an audio app of your choosing. Apple podcasts, Spotify, Amazon music anywhere you get audio. I'll be back very soon with another episode of The Juicebox Podcast.

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